^O^ Nobody has recognised the potential of ZFS + stacks and stacks of
cheap fast SATA drives?
I believe that this is realized and is being worked.
BTW, the SunFire x4500 is basically what you are describing.
:D. I know.
I guess there is not enough eSATA/SATA controllers out there...if I
had not found this SI3124 card and dug out Solaris' driver support of
this chip, I would have been really stumped as to what I would get for
my proposed backup server with Solaris as the OS. Plan A with 5 drive
external enclosure had to be shelved and Plan B with two 750GB SATA
drivers in single drive enclosures used instead. Good thing I still
have two extra eSATA ports for future expansion.
Please give us feedback with respect to how the si3124 driver works
for you.
My pleasure. I have not had any problems with it. Here is what happened.
Installed Nexenta (nevada b50), discovered the si3124 driver is
available in nevada b55 of which Nexenta had an update. Upgraded to
elatte unstable (how do you do this with nevada without BFU?) to get the
driver, shutdown the box (Dell GX280), plugged in SATA controller card,
turned box on, checked that si3124 driver is loaded, stuffed disks into
their single drive cases, plugged in power to cases, plugged disks into
eSATA ports. Looked up Solaris documentation on disk device management,
ran cfgadm thrice, ran zpool once, ran zfs as needed. I am sorry if I
sound like some teenager, this is my first on Solaris 10/Open Solaris.
Discovered that ON b55 does not have iscsi_target fix for some Windows
iSCSI problem, downloaded ON b59, installed it by having the
installation process wipe out the nexenta solaris partition, imported
the pool and voila, current state of affairs.
All in all, the hotswap experience was really great and seamless. No
echo 'something' > /proc/scsi magic like you need to do in Linux which I
have in fact forgotten now.
I have not tested unplugging the disks yet. I will have that done soon.
Also the marvell88sx driver (for Marvell 88SX50xx and 88SX60x1)
works well. There is also now support for ICH6 and the VT8251
(AHCI compliant) controllers.
I did not manage to find any PCI/PCI-X controllers based on those
chipsets. Then I did limit my searches to cards with multiple eSATA
ports. There were some that only had a single eSATA port but I did not
bother to check them out.
If I had not discovered this SI3124 card and dug out Open Solaris' new
SATA framework and the si3124 driver...I would have no choice but to
go to Linux.
Is the SATA framework in Solaris 10?
In Solaris 10 Update 2 and later it is present.
Thanks.
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