Looks like a nice mobo if the chipset drivers are available. For the drives, I use these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152175
No problems here. They are "green" 5400RPM drives. Silent, quiet, and fast enough. I have 12 of them in 2 raidz2 arrays, striped into a single pool. Streaming write speed is about 350MB/sec locally. More than enough as most access is over a gigabit LAN. Very reliable as well, I did get 1 bad drive in my order, but that was all. Treat every drive as possibly bad. My test cycle is to load them into a large mirror and fill it to 100%. Then scrub. If you get any errors on a drive, return it. Check dmesg as well. I also wait a while, scrub again, and when that's good, delete and re-fill and re-scrub. A little overkill, but I want to get any bad drives detected and removed while I can still easily get them replaced through the vendor. In my bad drive case, I wouldn't have found it for quite some time. I acted fine until I got to the last 25% or so of sectors. Then it would throw write errors. As for your uses, it should be fine. I have 2 tuners in MythTV working (HDHomeRun) via a Linux VM. No problems, and I generally have comerical flagging and other jobs running while recording, so it should be fine. One thing that will kill you depending on use. ZIL. If you use NFS, it will rear it's ugly head and kill your performance. I'm not sure on other protocols. For a home user, I'm not convinced it's even necessary. It can cause problems with NFS clients not to have it, if the server crashes, but it doesn't affect the reliability of the ZFS pool itself. A high end SSD is needed to get decent performance with ZIL. As for CPU, I'm using an AMD 3 core. It's odd as hell to see that in the cpu listings, but whatever. It works great. I'm just too used to powers of 2 in computers. :) For what you have mentioned, I wouldn't go quad. I expect they would sit nearly idle much of the time. I went with more because of the VM and video processing jobs I do on that machine. For RAM, spring for 8GB if you can. Or at least use 2 2GB modules so you don't have to toss your RAM when you do upgrade. Consider an SSD for L2ARC as well, I think that's my next upgrade. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
