>>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 you can in E1 model. E1 is single path model which supports both SAS and SATA. You need to know what you are buying. The Supermicro case you buy has backplane with SAS expander. In E2 model which supports multipathing, dual-port is required because each path needs access to the disk at the same time, thus SAS is required, SATA is single-port. If you want more bandwidth between your HBA and disks and better redundancy, you need multipathing so E2. I still suggest you go with nearline SAS. SAS is dual-port design, it has much better IOPS, command queue and error recovery. Data transfer speed is same between NS2 SAS and SATA. I know a lot of people have big problem with 7200.11 but this is not the same disk. It does cost even more than enterprise SATA. We have SATA disk shelves in NetApp, I say SATA doesn't belong to Enterprise. Granted, SATA is only used in dev environment, production uses 15K FC disks which we never have performance issue. The reason I use external disk shelf is I ran out of disk trays in head unit. Adding SAS shelf is the quick, easy and cheap way to expand storage. I won't touch cluster file system as it gets too complicated and way toooooo expensive. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
