Al Hopper writes: > I'm going to be somewhat rude and bypass your list of > detailed > questions - but give you my thoughts on a motherboard > recommendation > (and other hardware).
No worries, you've pretty much confirmed things I already knew. ;-) > a) related to the 1Tb disks, I'd highly recommend the > WD Caviar Black > drive. Its fast and the firmware does a great job on > different > workloads that vary between large file sequencial > read (workloads) to > (workloads that demand) lots of small random > reads/writes. Their > "dual processor" controller architecture really > works. I have been a fan of Seagate for the past few years, but it seems as if they have taken a big dive in the past six months. I was planing to go with WD for this project, though probably Green over Black, as heat and noise are the primary concerns. > b) If I were building a system today, I'd go Intel - > even thought I'm > n AMD fanboy - but I can't recommend AMD today ... > unfortunately. Aside from the ECC issue, of course. > c) RAM is the most important attribute of a ZFS based > server. Think > lots of RAM. Unfortunately, Intel has turned the > market into a > two-tier market, with the lower (price) tier limited > to 4 DIMM slots. > So, pick a board that has been tested with 4 * 2Gb or > 4 * 4Gb DIMM > configs and plan on building a system with at least > 4*2Gb DIMMs today. > > c1) If you have a choice, based on your budgetary > constraints, between > (for example) 4*1G of "performance" RAM and 4*2Gb of > "value" (main > stream performance) RAM - go with value RAM. > Whatever you do, PLEASE > aximize system memory capacity. I was planning to go with 2 x 2G sticks (total 4G) in a four slot mobo which would allow me to upgrade to 8G if necessary. I think 4G should be sufficient as I will be the only user for now. > d) The P45 based boards are a no-brainer. Great > performance, good > pricing, reasonable power consumption and highly > mature. While I would agree the P45 is mature in terms of mobo support, I have not seen indication that those motherboards are mature in terms of Solaris support. > e) If the board is going to be *only* used as a NAS, > the current CPU > "sweet spot" is, IMHO, the Intel Intel Core 2 Duo > E7200 (45nm, 2.53 > GHz, 3MB L2 Cache). Plenty of "horsepower", > low-power consumption, > nice cache capacity and priced to go! I was actually thinking the E5200 which seems nearly as powerful at 2/3 the price. > f) If you intend to use the box for other demanding > tasks (for > example, running other OS under VirtualBox) and need > more CPU power, > I'd pick the E8400 (dual core). But remember, the > priority is RAM > capacity first, upgraded CPU second. I really think > that the E7200 > will work well in your application. And I am planning to select a mobo that will take the latest 45 nm quad cores should I decide to do that upgrade down the road. > I really don't think you can go wrong with any Intel > based system that > has had a halfway decent review report card. The real question is how solid the P45/ICH10 support is with Solaris, and whether the lack of ECC supports negates much of the advantages of the P45/Core2. I have nothing against AMD (I was an AMD guy prior to the Core architecture) but I just have not seen much in the way of solid reports from the AMD mobo chipsets currently in production. -g. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
