> However, I have been subscribed to the ZFS lists for some time now and > done a Google check up for topics relating to this for some time, and > the jury still seems to be out on whether or not this would be a good > idea.
My only input is that when I used cheap-ass USB enclosures (for single disks) flush-cache commands never survived. i would get errors about unimplemented SCSI commands upon every ZFS transaction group commit. So a no-go for reliability (unless you can turn write caching off "through" the USB conversion - dunno, but even then you will instead suffer the performance penalty). I don't know whether this was because of USB, or because it was cheap-ass crap, or something else. Perhaps Firewire works better, especially considering it was the de de facto standard in Macs for a long time. The other issue is that I never seem to get decent performance out of USB, and in general have experienced USB enclosures and even USB hubs to be very buggy (randomly breaking, particularly with I/O happening with multiple devices at the same time, and then requireing power cycling to start working again). I started buying USB drives at one point to get around the problems with fitting many disks in consumer products (=stuff that doesn't cost $1000000), but eventually just gave up because of broken drive controllers (hello WD) and broken USB hardware. And don't think that a retailer will consider drives "broken" for the purpose of warranty when they exhibit identical problems on both Solaris and FreeBSD (with AFAIK independent USB implementations), but work in Windows... If you have luck with that then please post some public info as I am sure I would not be the only one to be interested in it. Wonder what those 8-ways cost new... -- / Peter Schuller PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>' Key retrieval: Send an E-Mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web: http://www.scode.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
