I'm building another 24-bay rackmount storage server, and I'm considering what drives to put in the bays. My chassis is a Supermicro SC846A, so the backplane supports SAS or SATA; my controllers are LSI3081E, again supporting SAS or SATA.
Looking at drives, Seagate offers an enterprise (Constellation) 2TB 7200RPM drive in both SAS and SATA configurations; the SAS model offers one quarter the buffer (16MB vs 64MB on the SATA model), the same rotational speed, and costs 10% more than its enterprise SATA twin. (They also offer a Barracuda XT SATA drive; it's roughly 20% less expensive than the Constellation drive, but rated at 60% the MTBF of the others and a predicted rate of nonrecoverable errors an order of magnitude higher.) Assuming I'm going to be using three 8-drive RAIDz2 configurations, and further assuming this server will be used for backing up home directories (lots of small writes/reads), how much benefit will I see from the SAS interface? -- Dave Pooser, ACSA Manager of Information Services Alford Media http://www.alfordmedia.com _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
