Supermicro AOC-USASLP-L8i has been confirmed to work flawlessly on OpenSolaris by several users on these forums already and is AFAIK widely considered the best controller for building custom Opensolaris ZFS NAS servers price/performance/compatibility wise in both SOHO NAS and HD HTPC scenarios.
Now Supermicro is shipping a new controller type with 8 internal 6Gb/s SAS/SATA ports which seems to be an even better investment: http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS2-L8i.cfm?TYP=E 1) Can anyone confirm it is fully compatible with Opensolaris? 2) Is it as stable as AOC-USAS2-L8e? Are there any known drawbacks compared to AOC-USAS2-L8e? 3) Does hot-swap cause any problems? 4) Does it support staggered spin-up? 5) The spec states it "Supports 122 devices as HBA in IT mode". Does this only imply you may connect more than 8 SAS drives via SAS Expanders or can you as well connect more than 8 SATA drives (e.g. via SATA Port Multipliers)? 6) Which ZFS pool configurations and connection schemes would you recommend to consider on a single server with 1-2 of these controllers in SOHO NAS and HD HTPC usage scenarios considering differences in performance characteristics, single raidz array expansion/upgrade CAPEX, HBA failure/corruption resiliency, etc.? (e.g. 4-disc raidz1 arrays vs. 8-disc raidz2 arrays vs. ...; all discs in the same raidz array connected to same controller vs. half of them connected to each controller) 7) Any further suggestions on choosing Opensolaris ZFS SOHO NAS and HD HTPC related hardware are welcome (suitable SSDs for ZIL, better 5-to-3 hot-swap internal backplane HDD cage than ICY DOCK MB455SPF-B, consumer HDDs more suitable than Samsung HD103UJ [1TB, 7200rpm, NCQ], recommended RAM size/type, ...) -dusan -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
