> I've got at least one available 5.25" bay. I hadn't > considered 2.5" HDs; > that's a tempting way to get the physical space I > need.
Yes, it is an interesting option. But remember about any necessary cooling if moving them from a currently cooled area. As I used SSDs this turned out to be irrelevant as they don't seem to get hot, but for mechanical drives this is not the case. > I'm running an SSD boot disk in my desktop box and so > far I'm very > disappointed (about half a generation too early, is > my analysis). And I > don't need the theoretical performance for this boot > disk. I don't see > the expense as buying me anything, and they're still > pretty darned > expensive. Which model/capacity are you using? Yes, they are not quite there yet, and I certainly should probably not have bothered buying these ones from the price perspective, as two 2.5" drives would have been fine. But for a desktop machine I'm quite surprised you're disappointed. But there is currently enormous variation in quality due to firmware making huge differences. They can only improve :) > I've considered having the boot disks not hot-swap. > I could live with > hat, although getting into the case is a pain (it > lives on a shelf over > my desk, so I either work on it in place or else I > disconnect and > reconnect all the external cabling; either way is > ugly). I think I would be tempted to maximise the available hot-swap bay space for data drives -- but only if it's required. > Logging to flash-drives is slow, yes, and will wear > them out, yes. But if > a $40 drive lasts two years, I'm very happy. And the > demise is > write-based in this scenario, not random failure, so > it should be fairly > predictable. Not an expert on this but I seem to remember that constant log-writing wore out these thumbdrives out, but don't quote me on that. 2.5" drives are very cheap too, and would be my personal choice in this case. > I'm trying to simplify here! But yeah, if nobody > comes along with a > significantly cheaper robust card of fewer ports, > I'll probably do the > same. If you find the extra ports & capacity upgrade options useful then you won't go wrong with that card. It's worked flawlessly for me. Along with the 8-ports on the card, you have the 6 additional ones remaining on the mobo, so lack of SATA ports will never be a problem again :) It gives you lots of space to juggle things around if you want to. One example, if one has a large case, is to make a backup pool from old drives within the same case. I haven't done this, but it has crossed my mind. As all the drives are local, the backup speed should be terrific, as there's no network involved... and if the drives were on a second PSU, which is only switched on to perform backups, no electricity needs to be wasted. I have to look into whether this is a workable idea though... > 6 or 8 hot-swap bays and enough controllers gives me > relatively few > interesting choices. 6: 2 three-way, or three > two-way; 8: four two-way, > or...still only 2 three-way. I don't think double > redundancy is worth > much to me in this case (daily backups to two or more > external media sets, > and hot-swap so I don't wait to replace a bad drive). Indeed, and often forgotten by home builders, is that if you have dependable regular backups which employ redundancy in the backup pool, then you don't need to be so paranoid about your main storage pool, although I personally prefer to have double parity. Extra insurance is a good thing :) > Actually, if I move the boot disks somewhere and have > 8 hot-swap bays for > data, I might well go with three two-way mirrors plus > two hot spares. Or > at least one. Yep, it gives you a lot of options :) Cheers, Simon http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
