I'm planning on building an expandable storage server at home, with a capacity 
of 30 HDDs. Basically a simple server with lots of room, that allows me to 
easily and cost-efficiently add more storage on demand (four drives per batch, 
raidz), while keeping the data at pristine state by scrubbing and monitoring 
the ZFS pools.
Although one USB-port alone is quite slow, I'm hoping that four drives together 
will give decent speeds.

[b]Why I think it should work[/b]
a.  
This blog: http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/opensolaris_home_server_zfs_and

b.
Hardware & drivers. It's a pain trying to find cheap controllers with solaris 
support and enough sata ports.

c.
The bandwidth per PCI lane is 133MB/s - which, at five drives per controller, 
yields 26MB/s per drive - USB is maxed at 20MB/s. 

d.
Simple and cheap conversion: http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.8110

There is currently one question in my mind:
- Is it possible to move the drives - and their pools - from USB over to SATA 
(and possibly back again) ?

As a sidenote, I've only used opensolaris for a couple of weeks on a vmware 
machine. I'll move over to a physical machine once I get the last pieces of 
hardware I need.
-- 
This message posted from opensolaris.org
_______________________________________________
storage-discuss mailing list
[email protected]
http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/storage-discuss

Reply via email to