On May 28, 2008, at 05:11, James Andrewartha wrote: > From what I can tell, all the vendors are only making SAS > controllers for > PCIe with more than 4 ports. Since SAS supports SATA, I guess they > don't see > much point in doing SATA-only controllers. > > For example, the LSI SAS3081E-R is $260 for 8 SAS ports on 8x PCIe, > which is > somewhat more expensive than the almost equivalent PCI-X LSI > SAS3080X-R > which is as low as $180.
That's not a huge price difference when building a server - thanks for the pointer. Are there any 'gotchas' the list can offer when using a SAS card with SATA drives? I've been told that SATA drives can have a lower MTBF than SAS drives (by a guy working QA for BigDriveCo), but ZFS helps keep the I in RAID. > For those downthread looking for full RAID controllers with battery > backup > RAM, Areca (who formerly specialised in SATA controlers) now do SAS > RAID at > reasonable prices, and have Solaris drivers. I've seen posts about misery with the sil and marvell drivers from about a year ago; is there a good way to pound an opensolaris driver to find its holes, in a ZFS context? On one hand I'd guess it shouldn't be too hard to simulate different kinds of loads, but on the other hand, if that were easy, the drivers' authors would have done that before unleashing buggy code on the masses. Thanks, -Bill ----- Bill McGonigle, Owner Work: 603.448.4440 BFC Computing, LLC Home: 603.448.1668 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cell: 603.252.2606 http://www.bfccomputing.com/ Page: 603.442.1833 Blog: http://blog.bfccomputing.com/ VCard: http://bfccomputing.com/vcard/bill.vcf _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
