I have built mine the last few days, and it seems to be running fine right now.
Originally I wanted Solaris 10, but switched to using SXCE (nevada build 94, the latest right now) because I wanted the new CIFS support and some additional ZFS features. Here's my setup. These were my goals: - Quiet as possible - Compact as possible - 6 drives minimum - Has all the right chipsets/etc. that Solaris of some sort supports Case: Antec P182 CPU: Athlon64 X2 Dual Core 4450e 2.3GHz (figured lower power is cool) Mobo: Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe (6 onboard SATA, 1 PATA [2 devices], 1 other SATA, but not supported well good enough for booting it seems) Optical: some random IDE DVD-RW I picked up Boot: Seagate IDE Data: 6x1TB Seagate SATA2 RAM: 4GB(2x2GB) DDR2 PC6400 800MHz Matched Pair Kingston (non ECC, unbuffered) Power Supply: CoolMax PS-V500 500W I got a Zalman heatsink/fan cooler that runs at 19dBa to replace the stock AMD one. I also got a 5.25" -> 3.5" enclosure so I can put my boot drive in the case. The case itself only has room for 6 3.5" drives normally. Originally I had an SATA DVD-ROM on that 7th port on the motherboard, it would boot the Solaris 10u5 and the Nevada 94 DVDs, but when it came time to install the OS/drivers, it could not load the DVD any longer. So it appears that chipset is not supported properly yet even in snv_94 (or I just didn't know what I was doing) The IDE DVD drive has no issues. I had my choice, and installed Solaris 10u5 first, but then noticed it didn't have the in-kernel CIFS server, which I was really hoping to use. I'd like to get the most performance I can get. I haven't done any benchmarks and I am new to Solaris so I am still learning but as of right now I think it is smooth sailing. I was able to easily setup a zpool, create some ZFS filesystems, share one of them via CIFS and mount it on XP, etc. It's a damn shame the HCL is so out of date. Also, die-hard Solaris folks don't seem to think this is a big issue, but someone coming from Linux/FreeBSD land thinks that the whole OpenSolaris vs. Nevada/SXCE vs. Solaris thing is confusing as hell, and made product selection a pain in the neck, as I wanted to build an Intel-based machine (I get discounts) and some Intel motherboards have 8 onboard SATA ports, but I don't know if the NIC chipsets and onboard video and such are supported properly... so I didn't want to order those and wind up having to return/RMA them somehow if they didn't work. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
