> Working on the assumption that you are going to be adding more drives to your server, why not just add the new drives to the Supermicro controller and keep the existing pool (well vdev) where it is?
That's not a bad idea. I just thought that the AOC-SAT2-MV8 has 2 more SATA ports than my mobo (M2N-SLI Deluxe), and so it gives me room for another 2 drives, as I would prefer to keep the *data* zpool running from a single SATA controller if possible, to help guarantee uniform & consistent behaviour. Also, as the AOC-SAT2-MV8 has the same Marvell chipset as the Thumper, so I've read, it should be a rock-solid solution. Having said that, the existing on-motherboard SATA controller is powered by the NVidia MCP55 chipset as far as I recall (mobo: NVidia 570 SLI chipset), and I chose this as some Sun workstations also used it and so it seemed to be supported. Mirrored BOOT: As an aside, my idea is to add 2 SSD drives as boot drives so I have a mirrored ZFS boot environment (named rpool, right?) within OpenSolaris 2009.06, but I need to read up a bit, as this may not even be possible right now, and I might need to just use a single SSD as a boot drive now... My idea would be to keep the boot SSD drive(s) powered by the exsisting motherboard SATA controller, and move the existing data pool onto the AOC-SAT2-MV8. AOC-SAT2-MV8 or AOC-USAS-L8i ?: I have to see if the AOC-SAT2-MV8 will work on the M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. I know that the mobo doesn't have PCI-X slots so I won't be able to run it at full speed, but I seem to remember people saying that it will work in 32-bit mode, a bit slower, from a PCI Express 2.0 slot... but I need to check this. From the supermicro site for the AOC-SAT2-MV8, I see that they don't list Solaris in the list of supported OSes, so I suppose the drivers for this card/chipset are made by Sun? One last point is that I've seen some people say that a possibly better card than the AOC-SAT2-MV8 is the AOC-USAS-L8i, which uses PCIe. I have to check with compatibility with this mobo though as it might not have PCIe. Just checked Asus's page for the M2N-SLI Deluxe mobo and it shows that it has the following expansion slots: 2 x PCI Express x16 slot at x16, x8 speed Support NVIDIA®SLI™ technology (both at x8 mode) 2 x PCI Express x1 3 x PCI 2.2 So it looks like running the AOC-USAS-L8i in one of the "PCI Express x16" slots might be a possibility too. Any tips/advice greatfully received :) -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
