Hey sexy people! I''m obviously an amature, so forgive me if I''m not asking in the right place... Background: I''ve got an old 4-CPU 4GB-RAM Ultra 80 that I use mostly for playing around with Oracle at home. I''d love to also use this beast as a gigantic file server to replace a crappy Dell/Windows 2003 Sever I use now with 4 250GB Western Digtal "enterprise" SATA drives (WD2500SD). In my dream world, I''d would love to find a way to plug in my SATA drives into my Ultra 80 and use an external enclosure with Solaris 10/ZFS for the file storage. I''d love to be able to just add more drives to the pool until as I fill them up. So [b]Question #1[/b] - Does anyone know of any SATA cards that would work in a SPARC based computer with supported drivers? Right now I''ve got an external 40MB SCSI Multipack with six 9GB drives, but it''s just not big enough for my entire music and movie collection. Besides, huge SATA drives are so much cheaper than decently large SCSI drives for my simple home use. Assuming that no such SATA interface hardware will work in the Ultra 80, I will probably end up building a cheap Opteron computer (after checking the HCL of course) and throw Solaris 10 on that one instead. That way I can just use something like a Coolermaster CM Stacker case to hold all the SATA drives. [b]Question #2[/b] - Any recommendations on SATA cards with drivers for x86-64 Solaris 10? [b]Question #3[/b] - Does ZFS''s built-in striping mean that I don''t even need my current LSI RAID-5 SATA (300-8X) card anymore? (Pretend for a second it was an option and had Solaris drivers, which it currently isn''t anyway.) I can''t be the only geeky home/small business user that wants a giant array of cheap SATA drives with ZFS. So how are other people planning on doing it? What hardware will you all use? This message posted from opensolaris.org
[b]Question #1[/b] -> Does anyone know of any SATA cards that would work in a SPARC based > computer with supported drivers? Right now I''ve got an external 40MB > SCSI Multipack with six 9GB drives, but it''s just not big enough for > my entire music and movie collection. Besides, huge SATA drives are > so much cheaper than decently large SCSI drives for my simple home > use.No SPARC sata that I know of. Perhaps someone else could shed light on this one? [b]Question #2[/b] - Any> recommendations on SATA cards with drivers for x86-64 Solaris 10?Anything with a SiliconImage 3112/3114 PCI add-in card should work. If the card comes with a raid BIOS, and most do, you can get the IDE bios from siliconimage.com and flash the card with that. I recommend that you stay away from trying to use SiliconImage onboard controllers because most motherboard manufactures only ship the RAID bios and unless your able to hack the SiliconImage release bios in place of that you wont get them to work with S10. Your best bet though if your going to build a new system anyways is to use an nForce 4 chipset based motherboard. The built in SATA works great with Solaris. I personally have a system that has nForce 4 Pro, total of 8 SATA ports onboard, with a 400GB drive attached to each. Works great with zfs. It is using the Supermicro H8DCE motherboard. The onboard gigabit ethernet works fine as well. http://www.supermicro.com/Aplus/motherboard/Opteron/nForce/H8DCE.cfm I recommend the Supermicro over the Tyan K8WE. The Tyan only has 4 SATA ports even though it has the IO804 controller onboard. They just choose to have SCSI as an option instead of using all 8 SATA ports. At home I use a Asus A8N SLI/Deluxe in my main desktop. The 4 SATA ports attached to the nForce chipset work great but the SiliconImage ones do not because they are RAID. The primary onboard Gig-E works as well. I have never tried it but the onboard sound is rumored to work as well with the audio810 driver.> [b]Question #3[/b] - Does ZFS''s built-in striping mean that I don''t > even need my current LSI RAID-5 SATA (300-8X) card anymore? (Pretend > for a second it was an option and had Solaris drivers, which it > currently isn''t anyway.) >Based on another thread today you can see the reasons why you would want to have zfs manage everything it can. Get it as close to the raw disk as you can.> I can''t be the only geeky home/small business user that wants a giant > array of cheap SATA drives with ZFS. So how are other people > planning on doing it? What hardware will you all use?You certainly are not. I am in the process of building up a multi-TB media server for myself at home. Having zfs integrate into Nevada was the one key thing I have been waiting for. I have been using zfs internally for almost a year now. The only time I have ever lost data on it was on a non-mirrored vdev that developed some bad blocks on one of the physical disks. Certainly not the fault of zfs though. This message> posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing > list zfs-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
Richard Elling - PAE
2005-Nov-17 01:12 UTC
[zfs-discuss] ZFS on SATA in my SPARC Ultra 80?
Jason Warr wrote:>> Does anyone know of any SATA cards that would work in a SPARC based >> computer with supported drivers? Right now I''ve got an external 40MB >> SCSI Multipack with six 9GB drives, but it''s just not big enough for >> my entire music and movie collection. Besides, huge SATA drives are >> so much cheaper than decently large SCSI drives for my simple home >> use.We use LSI 1064s for some systems. The drivers are more Solaris-specific than processor-specific. Try it and let us know (I don''t see many SATA cards listed in the IO technologies certification list :-( http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/PCI.html> [b]Question #2[/b] - Any > >> recommendations on SATA cards with drivers for x86-64 Solaris 10? > > > Anything with a SiliconImage 3112/3114 PCI add-in card should work. If > the card comes with a raid BIOS, and most do, you can get the IDE bios > from siliconimage.com and flash the card with that. I recommend that > you stay away from trying to use SiliconImage onboard controllers > because most motherboard manufactures only ship the RAID bios and unless > your able to hack the SiliconImage release bios in place of that you > wont get them to work with S10.We use LSI, SIIG, and NVidia MCPs, depending on the product. AFAIK, right now Solaris uses IDE emulation for SATA, so you''ll want to avoid setting up the onboard RAID. There are some exceptions, with more drivers available from many sources regularly (eg HP has drivers for their RAID stuff) -- richard
Thanks for the replies everyone. I did get an IOGear USB 2.0 PCI card (I don''t remember the exact model number) to work in the Ultra 80 a while ago. Is there any reason not to use a few basic USB 2.0 <-> SATA external enclosures and build a RAID-Z array out of them? I''m not going for blazing fast performace nearly as much as I just want huge amounts of storage in a reasonably redundant array. Can anyone think of a reason why that would be a bad idea? This message posted from opensolaris.org
> Jason Warr wrote: > > We use LSI 1064s for some systems. The drivers are > more Solaris-specific > than processor-specific.Where do I find PCI LSI 1064 cards? Do you know? The closest I''ve found so far is a Concurrent Technologies SC PMC/SA1, which would have to be placed in a PMC-PCI carrier (which i found) but i have no idea what this will cost, and if it will even work on a SPARC box at all. Am I wasting my time trying to get SATA onto SPARC gear?> Try it and let us know (I > don''t see many SATA > cards listed in the IO technologies certification > list :-( > http://www.sun.com/io_technologies/PCI.htmlThere is a complete lack of SAS, SATA and PATA controllers on this page. It''s confusing, since I know there should be a lot that are supported by x86/x64 at the very least. Who do we bug about this? I *really* want SATA/SAS on a PCI SPARC box! Thanks!! -brian This message posted from opensolaris.org
[appogies for duplicates, the forum-email gateway is, uhmm, flaky]> > Jason Warr wrote: > > > > We use LSI 1064s for some systems. The drivers > are > > more Solaris-specific > > than processor-specific. > > Where do I find PCI LSI 1064 cards? Do you know? > The closest I''ve found so far is a Concurrent > t Technologies SC PMC/SA1, which would have to be > placed in a PMC-PCI carrier (which i found) but i > have no idea what this will cost, and if it will even > work on a SPARC box at all. Am I wasting my time > trying to get SATA onto SPARC gear?For the T2000 we use a PCI-X SAS board based on the LSI 1064. Alas, it is not separately orderable from the SunStore :-(. This is actually a placeholder until the PCI-E version is integrated. The good news is that the support is in later versions of NV (IIRC, b28) including raidctl(1m) which is what you need to run current ZFS bits. -- richard This message posted from opensolaris.org