> From: opensolaris-help-boun...@opensolaris.org [mailto:opensolaris- > help-boun...@opensolaris.org] On Behalf Of Annika > > Hi everybody, I'm new in this community, since beginning of May 2010 > I've been following some of the mailing lists with the intention of > learning for setting up a small O.S. server this autumn. Have studied > the HCL carefully and come to the conclusion that a Dell Perc 5/i disc > controller will satisfy my needs. But, on the internet I've stumbled > upon cards like this > Dell MG129 SAS 5iR 5/iR SAS / Serial Attached SCSI RAID Controller > <http://discountechnology.com/Dell-MG129-PERC-5-iR-SAS-Serial-Attached- > SCSI-RAID-Controller> > and I cannot find any documentation what so ever about it. > Any one with experience of these, are they useful, i.e. supported by > O.S. ?
I don't have any answer that addresses your question, but I will say this: You are better off, if you forget about the HBA, and just use a really brainless SATA (or whatever) card with a bunch of ports instead. Buy an SSD (or mirror of SSD's) for ZIL log instead. It performs better than the cache of an HBA because ZFS does smarter caching in software than any hardware is capable of doing. But you need to give ZFS some nonvolatile storage to write on, in order to take advantage of that. The main value-add of an HBA is to blink a red light on a hotswappable failed disk. If you do use the HBA, be sure you check to see if the software runs in whatever version of solaris / opensolaris you're using. You mentioned the Dell Perc. Although it is technically possible to use megacli to control the perc ... OMG, does it suck. If it's not a huge inconvenience, please do consider some other HBA with hopefully a better management software for this OS. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
