> So I was hoping that this board would work: [...]GA-M57SLI-S4
I''ve been looking at that very same board for the very same purpose. It
has 2 gb nics, 6 sata ports, supports ECC memory and is passively
cooled. And it''s very cheap compared to most systems that people
recommend for running OpenSolaris on. (A GA-M57SLI-S4, an Athlon64
LE-1620 and 2 * 1GB 800MHz DDR2 ECC all together sum up to a total of
only 165-175 ? here, which is a lot less than what the recommended SATA
cards cost. Add 3 500GB disks and you have a pretty nice raid-z system
for only a total of 440 ? (assuming you already have a case and PSU,
which I do). Or you could use 3 1TB disks instead and add a good UPS
and still have the whole package for less than 1000 ?.)
There are not many reports about the nforce 570 sli chipset, but
several people have got the nforce 570 chipset working without problems.
Here is a system with the GA-M57SLI-S4 in the HCL:
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hcl/data/systems/details/2714.html
It says the SATA ports run in "Legacy Mode" (which means no hotswap or
NCQ, but I don''t know if it has any other downsides, anyone?) in
Solaris
Express Developer Edition 05/07. However, there seems to have been new
MCP55 (all nf570 are mcp55-based) drivers released since then:
http://bugs.opensolaris.org/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6296435
Has anyone tested the "new" mcp55 drivers with the sata ports on an
nforce 570 sli motherboard?
- Marcus