Hmm... You know, that's a good question. I'm not sure if those SATA II ports support hot swap or not. The motherboard is fairly new, but taking a look at the specifications provided by Gigabyte (http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Motherboard/Products_Spec.aspx?ProductID=2874) doesn't seem to yield anything. To tell you the truth, I think they're just plain 'ol dumb SATA II ports - nothing fancy here.
But that's alright, because hot swappable isn't something I'm necessarily chasing after. It would be nice, of course, but the thing that we want the most is stability during hardware failures. For this particular server, it is _far_ more important for the thing to keep chugging along and blow right through as many hardware failures as it can. If it's still got 3 of those 4 drives (which implies at least 2 data and 1 parity, or 3 data and no parity) then I still want to be able to read and write to those NFS exports like nothing happened. Then, at the end of the day, if we need to bring the machine down in order to install a new disk and resilver the RAID-Z array, that is perfectly acceptable. We could do that around 6:00 or so when everyone goes home for the day and when its much more convenient for us and the users, and let the resilvering/repairing operation run over night. I also read the PDF summary you included in your link to your other post. And it seems we're seeing similar behavior here. Although, in this case, things are even simpler: there are only 4 drives in the case (not 8), and there is no extra controller card (just the ports on the motherboard)... It's hard to get any more basic than that. As for testing in other OSes, unfortunately I don't readily have a copy of Windows available. But even if I did, I wouldn't know where to begin: almost all of my experience in server administration has been with Linux. For what it's worth, I have already established the above (that is, the seamless experience) with OpenSuSE 11.0 as the operating system, LVM as the volume manager, madam as the RAID manager, and XFS as the filesystem, so I know it can work... I just want to get it working with OpenSolaris and ZFS. :) This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
