The motherboard is AMD based and it has two controllers; one OnChip controller that is integrated into the SouthBridge chip (SB750) and an OnBoard controller using the JMicron JMB362 chip and a JMB322 port multiplier. Both controllers supports both AHCI and Native IDE mode which can be configured via the BIOS.
I saw that Solaris has a power management tool called dtpower but from what I can see it cannot use different settings for individual drives. If I could, I would set the drives in the pool to be always on and the spares to turn off after say one hour. The problem is that the same setting applies to [u]all[/u] drives which is not so useful and if I want to access one drive I don't want to wake up all the drives in the same pool (in this case the hot spares) or drives belonging to any other pool for that matter. From what I can read in the OpenSolaris documentation cfgadm is used for connecting and disconnecting PCI hardware. I cannot see how it is used for disconnecting individual drives without disconnecting the entire HBA. Hard drives sure work like a charm until the day they fail. The WD EcoGreen probably has been around for about a year and my guess is that you purchased them about half a year ago. I'm willing to bet that you will not have the same opinion about them in about 4 years from now. I don't know much about AHCI in OpensSolaris but it seems like there is an intention to implement power management features in the future: http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+device_drivers/AHCI It says that port multipliers are not supported yet, I'm not really sure what that is supposed to mean. Port multipliers are usually not visible to the system (if I understand it correctly) and I couldn't see any complaints about the JMB322 in the Hardware Compatibility Check Tool, (it wasn't even visible). I found the following in the LSI user manual by the way: Supports power management – Supports PCI power management 1.2 – Supports Active State Power Management (ASPM), including the L0, L0s, L1 states, by placing links in a power-savings mode during times of no link activity Thank you for reminding me to flash the HBA to IT-Mode firmware, I was going to forget that. I'll try out the behavior of ZFS once I get the system together, I'm still waiting for additional computer parts (a CPU backplate to mount the heat sink is missing). I'll see if it is possible to at least cold swap hard drives between controllers and I already have a preconceived notion that this won't be a problem. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
