Jeremy, thanks for your response.
Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
SATA150 and SATA300 both work just fine on FreeBSD, but its dependent
upon what chipset you go with. I would strongly recommend you go with a
board/system that uses Intel's ICH7, 8, or 9 southbridge. I have
extensive experience using these in production environments, and they
are very reliable, plus fast. FreeBSD works quite well with them.
I do have a board with an ICH10 chipset but the SATA drives are detected
as UDMA-33.
I guess the ICH* chipsets would not support AMD64, being an intel chip.
Second, I wouldn't bother considering using Intel MatrixRAID (which all
of the above chipsets support) for any sort of failover for your root/OS
disk, in case you're tempted to try it. FreeBSD has bugs pertaining to
such support (see below Wiki URL for some examples).
Yeah, I'm not so keen of the modern trend to have on-board raid. I'd
rather keep it simple and let FreeBSD handle it. Root disk will not be
raid at all.
Third, I cannot recommend nVidia chipsets, because there have been
numerous reports recently and in the past where the SATA disks are being
detected as UDMA33. I believe there are some ATI/AMD chipsets which are
doing the same. There is a rumour that the operational speed of the
disks is still SATA150/300, and just that FreeBSD is labelling the
negotiated speed wrong, but my recommendation is not to risk it.
Hmmm, some people say nforce4 chipsets are cool, some not... It's hard
to know which way to go.
Fourth, because you'll likely have multiple disks in a ZFS zpool, you
should probably be aware of the problem that haunts some users from time
to time (re: DMA errors).
I've seen it on old ATA hardware.
http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/ATA_issues_and_troubleshooting
I'd be willing to go with intel arch although from a ZFS perspective it
sounds like AMD64 is better.
There was a recent discussion on developers@ (which is private) about
some topics, which eventually lead into a discussion about ZFS, tuning,
and a 2GB kmem limit in FreeBSD (which affects amd64 too). I can't copy
the conversation/thread because developers@ has a strict "do not
disclose" policy.
I thought that the 2gb limit was less of a problem for AMD64 because of
the addressing used.
Just be aware you ***will*** need to tune ZFS on FreeBSD to make it
as reliable as possible.
We'll like I said, I'd be willing to jump on a list and provide info etc
about my setup. I plan to have it running on a test bench with lots of
IO for a week or so before I start using it. Even then the data will
not be critical so if it breaks then I can rebuild without hassle.
System disk will be UFS2 to keep it simple...
I've got it running on desktop hardware (ASUS P5Q board with ICH5) while
I wait for a decision on a permanent Motherboard. With this setup I see
about 60mb write speeds on ZFS across 5 disks. I've done the basic
tuning suggested in the Wiki. One thing I notice is that the CPU is
used for 30% on Interrupts. It was firewire first, so I disabled it in
the BIOS, then it went to UHCI so I disabled all USB ports. Now it is
on the ATA controller. All of this was on the same interrupt (19).
I'm thinking of getting a couple of Promise SATA-300 TX4 IO cards
(non-raid). Perhaps that will offload the CPU.
-D
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