JDW wrote: > I having been doing a lot of reading about various good and bad experiences > people have had with pretty much every . > > We will be using SATA drives, plus SLC SSD's for L2ARC and ZIL. > > What is/are the hands-down best supported most-reliable storage controller(s) > to use to support 16 SATA devices? I would prefer not to pay for RAID > functionality we won't use with ZFS, but if we have to, we will. > > We are betting a large part of our business on the performance and stability > of this server. (And we sadly cannot afford Sun hardware.) We can't use > anything that's going to have problems like hangs on disk failures or > removals, like I've read about some people having as I've searched around > here. It's got to 100% work for production datacenter usage. > > Thanks for any advice! We have pretty much got the server design locked down > except for this. >
LSI MegaRAID (MegaSAS). The high end RAID controllers will support both SATA or SAS, so don't rule out "SAS" controllers just because you want SATA drives. The flexability over time is nice as well. The LSI MegaRAID drivers are already in Solaris and fully supported. The cards are bullet proof. You can get them from NewEgg or through your vendor/VAR, everyone re-sells 'em. The Adaptec cards are trash imho, and while some people boast about other (namely 3ware) cards, nothing out there is better supported, more widely deployed, or more reliable than the LSI MegaRAID controllers. BTW, if you buy one on a component site like NewEgg make sure it has the RAID controller on board... the lower end (cheaper) version may not. Here is a good card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118061 It goes without saying, upgrade the firmware before testing, and always do some testing (pull a drive, insert a drive, etc) to ensure your fully comfortable with its capabilities. Good luck! benr. _______________________________________________ storage-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss
