My current home fileserver (running Open Solaris 111b and ZFS) has an ASUS M2N-SLI DELUXE motherboard. This has 6 SATA connections, which are currently all in use (mirrored pair of 80GB for system zfs pool, two mirrors of 400GB both in my data pool).
I've got two more hot-swap drive bays. And I'm getting up towards 90% full on the data pool. So, it's time to expand, right? I have two approaches in contention: #1, I can just swap drives for bigger drives, waiting for resilver and taking the risk that the other drive will fail during the resilver (I do have backups, plus I've got the old removed drive as well, so I could recover from a failure during resilver with some downtime). #2, I can find or install two additional SATA ports and put two more drives in the open bays. I've even got two 400GB drives sitting available; that's a 50% increase on current storage, so I'm not inclined to spend money for new drives yet, even though these are quite small. (I picked up a pile of free Sun-badged Hitachi 400GB drives when the project I was on at the time decided they were too small to use and put them out for people to take home. I grabbed two right away, and very conscientiously stayed away for a while to give other people a good shot too. But I took another drive every hour, and left with 7 of them. There were still some there when I left, so I feel virtuous rather than greedy.) I prefer approach two. Three pair gives me more flexibility and more performance than two, plus I don't have to pay for new drives right away since I've got spare 400GB drives around. Plus it probably bothers me more than it should that I'm "wasting" two of the fairly expensive hot-swap bays. So, with regard to option #2, I have two questions. First, there's some sign that this motherboard has an integral raid controller. Can it also be used to drive bare drives? If I could just find two more usable controller ports (with good drivers and hot-swap support), I'd be happy without spending any money. Anybody understand this motherboard? Second, if I have to buy an additional controller, what should I buy for driving two (or at most 4; I suppose it might make sense to reduce the load on the motherboard controller) SATA drives from this motherboard? I believe I have a free PCI-Express x16 slot and two x1 slots (and don't understand these new-fangled ports very well). I want stability, +- 10% performance is not at all important. Cheap is good :-) (paying my own money here!). (Obvious additional choices like replacing the whole box are not interesting; its performance is fine for my needs, and it can easily handle increased disk capacity.) Also, I probably should upgrade to more recent code than snv_111b, eh? What's a demonstrated-to-be-stable code level I could upgrade to? I'm not desperately missing any of the newer features, but I'm looking for bug fixes, especially any that relate to zfs send-receive, which I'm attempting to use to transfer incremental backups to an external USB drive (set up as a single-disk pool). Also I will put more memory in while I've got it open, but I can figure out what memory it takes for myself :-). I'd greatly appreciate motherboard expertise, controller advice, and code version advice from people with experience. Thanks! -- David Dyer-Bennet, d...@dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
