I would agree that the performance of the SiI 3114 is not great. I have a similar ASUS board, and have used the standalone controller as well. Adaptec makes a nice 2-channel SATA card that is a lot better, though about 2x as much money. The Supermicro/Marvell controller is very well rated and supports 8 drives I think. The best option would be to get the LSI card that also works on SPARC hardware (which is way more industrial-grade than anything pee-cee) - but that card is about 300 bux.
Remember that ZFS obsoletes the need for hardware RAID, so you will need (for example in the case of the 3114) to set the controller to expose individual disks to the OS. In the case of the 3114 this means re-flashing the controller BIOS. As far as the system goes, make sure you use 64-bit proc (you can address a lot more memory with ZFS this way) and lots of RAM. Anything below 4gb of RAM in the Solaris world is considered paltry :^) - Solaris makes extremely good use of lots of RAM, and ZFS in particular (because of it's smart I/O scheduler) enjoys nice performance gains on a box with lots of RAM. If I were you, I'd buy the cheapest 64-bit proc you can and spend the saved money on maxing the RAM out. Blake On 9/28/07, Christopher <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I'm new to the list so this is probably a noob question: Are this forum > part of a mailinglist or something? I keep getting some answers to my posts > in this thread on email as well as some here, but it seems that those > answers/posts on email aren't posted on this forum..?? Or do I just get a > copy on email from what ppl post here on the forum? > > Georg Edelmann wrote me on email saying he was interested in making a > homeserver/nas as I'm about to (try to) do and wanted to know my hardware > etc. > > What I was thinking of using for this server was Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe with > some kind of AMD64 CPU, probably the cheapest X2 I can find and pair it with > 1 or perhaps 2GB of RAM. The mainbord has 8 SATA onboard, 4 nvidia and 4 > sil3114. I was also gonna get a 2sata add-on controller card, totalling 10 > sata ports. But now I'm not sure, since alhopper just said the performance > of the 3114 is poor. > > Blake, on the other hand mentioned the Sil3114 as a controller chip to > use. I will of course not make use of the fake-raid on the mainboard. > > Kent - I see your point and it's a good one and, but for me, I only want a > big fileserver with redundancy for my music collection, movie collection and > pictures etc. I would of course make a backup of the most important data as > well from time to time. > > > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > zfs-discuss mailing list > zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss >
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