If you choose the AOC-USAS-L8i controller route, don't worry too much about the exotic looking nature of these SAS/SATA controllers. These controllers drive SAS drives and also SATA drives. As you will be using SATA drives, you'll just get cables that plug into the card. The card has 2 ports. You buy a cable that plugs in to the port and fans out into 4 SATA connectors. Just buy 2 cables if you need to drive 8 drives, or at least more than 4.
SuperMicro sell a few different cable lengths for these cables, so once you've measured, you can choose. Take a look at this post of mine and look for the card, cables and text where I also remarked on the scariness factor of dealing with 'exotic' hardware. http://breden.org.uk/2009/08/29/home-fileserver-mirrored-ssd-zfs-root-boot/ And cables are here: http://supermicro.com/products/accessories/index.cfm http://64.174.237.178/products/accessories/index.cfm (DNS failed so I gave IP address version too) Then select 'cables' from the list. From the cables listed, search for 'IPASS to 4 SATA Cable' and you will find they have a 23cm version (CBL-0118L-02) and a 50cm version (CBL-0097L-02). Sounds like your larger case will probably need the 50cm version. Cheers, Simon http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
