>Can you use SATA drives with expanders at all? (I have to stick >to enterprise/nearline SATA (100 EUR/TByte vs. 60 EUR/TByte >consumer SATA) for cost reasons).
Yes, the expander has nothing to do with the drive in front of it. I have several SAS expanders with SATA drives on them. >What is the advantage of using external disk expanders? >They use up more rack height units and add hardware expense >and cabling hassle for very little to show for it, IMHO. Because a single port on any HBA/RAID controller far exceeds the speed of any single disc. Your analogy doesn't scal well past what you can fit into a single server. You also assume every disc enclosure only holds the discs in a similar fashion to the way they would be oriented in the supermicro chassis. Here's a nice read: http://www.scsita.org/aboutscsi/sas/SAS_Expander.doc jlc _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
