Thanks for replying! I did look into that. The AMD design was my second choice.
It was : AMD Athlon II X2 240e (to get low power; the dual core and lack of L3 help there) ASUS motherboard (see considerations below) Cheap VGA? LAN card? This is the mire that ultimately bogged down this one. Given that data integrity drove me to Opensolaris and zfs for a file server instead of to a simple NAS box which would have been cheaper and easier, I reasoned as follows: - yep, raidz2 is going to meet data integrity better than raidz; so I need plug in capacity for six disks minimum, that gets to raidz2 with the lowest number of data integrity issues based on disk failure (I think...) - there are six-SATA and more motherboards which exist, so there is a premium on using one of these MBs if opensolaris supports the SATA controller on the MB, instead of finding and buying one or more disk controller cards. The disk card which seems most supported and cheapest seems to be the Supermicro PCI-x eight-SATA version for $100. One could argue that two-three cheaper cards would get you under $100, but that then begs the issue of complexity, number of slots on the MB, and additional electrical power use, which is a secondary consideration, but one which is an obvious issue with the more cards stuffed into the box. So a six-SATA native controller is a Good Thing - back at data integrity, a motherboard failure is a problem too; a well-trusted and well tested MB is a plus. I took that to mean "don't buy a MB with "overclocking" mentioned as a plus for it, and don't bother with all the fancy onboard widgies you can get. My personal positive experiences have been with ASUS, Gigabyte, and Intel. I have had motheboard deaths and erratic behavior with ECS, FCI, and DFI. Haven't used a Supermicro, but they seem to be highly recommended. - gotta have ECC RAM on the MB - amount of memory is pretty much a don't care these days; 4gb to 8gb are probably fine, maybe even less is OK. - number of slots is only an issue if I have to use external disk cards. This might be an issue if I was trying to get over a few TB of server storage, but I'm pretty happy with under 10TB. If I was trying to fill up a 20-30 disk array, I'd have different answers. I can't afford that many disks. So a 6-SATA MB is a good compromise. - intel vs AMD CPUs is a don't-care to a first approximation. Both support 64bit, both have ECC support in some flavors. This means select based on MB features, not architecture. At a secondary level, AMD seems to be cheaper and perhaps lower power if you get especially the newly announced "e" versions, notably the Athlon II X2 240e. But saving $100 on a processor or 20W on the power budget isn't worth not having the right number of disks on the MB or hot having chipset drivers be available. I've written device drivers, years ago. I used to wrestle in college, too, but I wouldn't want to walk back out on a mat at this point in my life either... 8-) On the AMD side of things, I'd have gone with the X2 240e I mentioned. It's a 45nm chip, AM2+/AM3 socket, 45W TDP. Probably $60-70 if I could find one in stock; it's new enough that it's hard to find. The competing intel chip is the dual processor Xeon E3110 at 65W, for $180. So AMD saves me $100 right off the bat. But what motherboard? All the AMD chips have ECC support inside their chipsets, so all we have to do is find a MB which lets that work. There are MBs around which note that they'll take ECC or non-ECC memory. The question is whether they *do* anything when there's an ECC fault. I went through the entire Gigabyte line and could find no BIOS support for ECC reporting/action. They may let you use the memory, but they don't actually do anything if there's a fault. This is very much like taking the spare tire off your car, but feeling OK because there's a place where one could go, to me at least. That gets me down to Intel, ASUS, and Supermicro boards for AMD. ...oops, there are remarkably few intel-brand MBs which support AMD chips! OK, ASUS and Supermicro. In the ASUS line, AMD suggests only the ASUS M4A78T-E for the Athlon II X2. This has only 5 SATA (bad!) but two PCIex X8 slots (good!). The sixth SATA is routed to an ESATA port on the back of the motherboard. Clumsy, but could be usable, I guess. The chipset is the AMD 790GX and SB750, with Atheros (?)L1E LAN and Radeon HD3300 graphics. Downloading and checking the user's manual shows that ECC can indeed be set to ... something... which might work. And here's where I diverged from this stack. I had dim results trying to find confirmation that the chipsets were supported under opensolaris. I got some indication they did, some that they didn't, or that they had problems. Apparently one could insert a VGA card and a LAN card and get around that. I ... think ... the SATA controller works under opensolaris, and you could run an ESATA cable back through a hole in the case to get a sixth SATA disk. This uncertainty is what pushed me back to the intel Xeon stack. I've thrashed this pretty hard for several weeks now. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
