zfs discuss - Dec 2009 - what is the best way to hook up my drives

I am planning on building an opensolaris server to replace my NAS.

My case has room for 20 hotswap sata drives and 1 or 2 internal drives.  I
was planning on going with 5 raidz vdevs each with 4 drives, and maybe a hot
spare inside the case in one of the extra slots.

I am going to use 2 Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards (pci-x 133 each with 8
sata ports)

The motherboard is going to be either Supermicro mbd-c2sbx or Supermicro
mbd-x7sbe  both have 6 onboard sata ports.  So, I''ve got a couple
things i
could do...If possible i''d like to avoid buying another raidcard UNLESS
i
can find one for under 100 dollars......what i''m wondering is, what is
the
best way to construct my vdevs.

Should i have all 4 drives on a single raid card, then the next vdev on
another raid card?  Should i try to create them where i put 1 drive on one
card, 2 on one then one on the motherboard for each vdev, alternating which
gets 2 drives? Any suggestions would be helpful.


It''s mainly going to be used for high def x264 movie playback over
samba or
nfs to 4 or 5 htpc''s.

My current machine is FreeBSD 8.0 with ZFS and has 3 raidz vdevs each with 4
drives, but they are all on the same controller (which is a highpoint
rocketraid 2340)

I used FreeBSD because solaris didnt'' work with this card, but with me
upgrading, this soon won''t be an issue.  If i were to buy a 3rd raid
card to
use one of the pci-e slots, would it be best to avoid using the onboard
ports all together or would it then make more sense to create vdevs with one
drive connected to each (3 raid cards, 1 onboard)


Is there a compatible 8 port pci-e card under 150 dollars?

thanks.
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