On Fri, 2010-07-09 at 15:02 -0400, Miles Nordin wrote:
> >>>>> "ab" == Alex Blewitt <alex.blew...@gmail.com> writes:
>
> ab> All Mac Minis have FireWire - the new ones have FW800.
>
> I tried attaching just two disks to a ZFS host using firewire, and it
> worked very badly for me. I found:
>
> 1. The solaris firewire stack isn't as good as the Mac OS one.
Indeed. There has been some improvement here in the past year or two,
but I still wouldn't deem it ready for serious production work.
>
> 2. Solaris is very obnoxious about drives it regards as
> ``removeable''. There are ``hot-swappable'' drives that are not
> considered removeable but can be removed about as easily, that are
> maybe handled less obnoxiously. Firewire's removeable while
> SAS/SATA are hot-swappable.
Actually, most of the "removable" and "hotpluggable" devices have the
same handling. But SAS/SATA HBAs rarely identify their devices as
hotpluggable, even though they are. There are other issues you hit as a
result here.
We're approaching the state where all media are hotpluggable with the
exception of legacy PATA and parallel SCSI. And those are becoming
rarer and rarer. (Granted many hardware chassis don't support hotplug
of internal SATA drives, but that's an attribute of the chassis.)
>
> 3. The quality of software inside the firewire cases varies wildly
> and is a big source of stability problems. (even on mac) The
> companies behind the software are sketchy and weak, while only a
> few large cartels make SAS expanders for example. Also, the price
> of these cases is ridiculously high compared to SATA world. If
> you go there you may as well take your wad next door and get SAS.
I'd be highly concerned about whether 1394 adapters did cache flush
correctly.
-- Garrett
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