> Thanks! That's quite a useful bit of info, much like > what > I'd hoped for out of the HCL. I'd decided that ASUS > had > reliable-enough motherboards, AMD processors were > certainly usable and all support ECC. But the issues > with > the on-board ethernet chips and the disk controllers > were > something I was trying to avoid. > > An AMD CPU can save you a neat $100 pretty quickly, > as can an ASUS versus Supermicro motherboard. On the > other hand, an intel-chip NIC is $50 and a > Supermicro > disk controller is $80-$100, so the savings get > eaten > up quickly. When I factor in my clumsy, inept > fumbling > with a new OS, the scales tip to "better support" > quickly. > > Thanks for the reply - that is very, very useful > info.
The onboard disk controller does work properly. I'm using it for my boot drives. Just set it to AHCI in the BIOS or OpenSolaris will only see 4 ports. The NIC also works, I just wasn't 100% sure it would so I bought the Intel NIC so I would be sure to be able to get on the network. I believe that the 2009.06 release doesn't know the PCI ID of the onboard NIC, so you do have to edit files a bit to get it working. Later releases do detect it though. If you need more than 6 SATA ports, you will likely need an add-on card for more drives as most motherboards top out around there. The Supermicro boards are expensive, but they are supported well and are one of the very few options for more than 4 ports in PCI Express. Most of the other boards out there are expensive RAID controllers. And I did get what seems to be a good workaround for the MPT driver issue I was seeing. No errors in the past 16 hours or so. I believe the cheaper 4 port Silicon Image boards everyone seems to sell are also supported in OpenSolaris. I had one of those die in my old server though, so I was willing to pay more for reliability. Perhaps if you said how many drives you want and such? It's hard to give good recommendations when we don't know exactly what you're after. I'm using 2 drives for root in a mirror from the onboard controller and 8 drives (soon to be 12) on the SuperMicro controllers for mass storage. As that means I had to design for 16 SATA ports, I was forced to the controller cards as I've never encountered a motherboard with that many onboard SATA ports. If you wanted 4 data drives and 2 boot drives, there are a lot of options for motherboards with 6 SATA ports onboard that work fine with OpenSolaris. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
