There's been a fair bit of discussion about both on the boards Mike, from my own experience and what I've read they both run fine, but each has their own disadvantages.
I've got two AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards, and I've found that while they work well, hot plug isn't possible with the current drivers. I've raised a bug for that and for the time being I'm just going to power down the server if we do need to swap a drive out. We're using three way mirrors here so I've got plenty of time to schedule a shutdown if a disk does fail, but it's a bit annoying to have a brand new server without hotplug support. Regarding the AOC-USAS-L8i card, I read that somebody on here was using one, but had run into a problem regarding drive naming. It sounds like SAS doesn't use fixed port numbers for labelling the drives like SATA controllers do, and instead disks get labelled in the order they're detected. While that might be fine to begin with, the problem is that if you have to replace any disks, your drive names are going to have no obvious relation to the slot they are in, and short of keeping a manual list of which drives are where, finding the drive you need to replace could be a nightmare. On Sun hardware identifying drives is much easier, once you do "cfgadm -c unconfigure", the "ready to remove" LED lights up. On non Sun kit I think it's probably safer to go with the SATA controller for now. You might not be able to hot plug, but at least you know you'll be pulling the right drives. It's frustrating at the moment as there doesn't appear to be any server sold by Sun that's just right for what I want to do. I think the Supermicro 836TQ chassis with the two SATA controllers is probably the best server I could put together for ZFS right now, but I'd have bought a Sun server like a shot if there was anything available. We've got two x2200's here now and I've trialed an x4500, and they really are very nicely put together machines. The problem is there's nothing in Sun's range that's comparable to that Supermicro chassis. Sixteen 3.5" SATA drives in a 3U chassis is pretty much ideal for a small to medium size firm like ourselves. 3.5" drives make for a really cost effective server, with tons of storage and pretty good performance. Ross This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
