>>>>> "ab" == Alex Blewitt <alex.blew...@gmail.com> writes:
ab> All Mac Minis have FireWire - the new ones have FW800.
I tried attaching just two disks to a ZFS host using firewire, and it
worked very badly for me. I found:
1. The solaris firewire stack isn't as good as the Mac OS one.
2. Solaris is very obnoxious about drives it regards as
``removeable''. There are ``hot-swappable'' drives that are not
considered removeable but can be removed about as easily, that are
maybe handled less obnoxiously. Firewire's removeable while
SAS/SATA are hot-swappable.
3. The quality of software inside the firewire cases varies wildly
and is a big source of stability problems. (even on mac) The
companies behind the software are sketchy and weak, while only a
few large cartels make SAS expanders for example. Also, the price
of these cases is ridiculously high compared to SATA world. If
you go there you may as well take your wad next door and get SAS.
4. The translation between firewire and SATA is not a simple one, and
is not transparent to 'smartctl' commands, or other werid things
like hard disk firmware upgraders. though I guess the same is
true of the lsi controllers under solaris. This problem's rampant
unfortunately.
5. Firewire is slow. too slow to make 2x speed interesting. and the
host chips are not that advanced so they use a lot of CPU.
6. The DTL partial-mirror-resilver doesn't work. With b130 it still
doesn't work. After half a mirror goes away and comes back,
scrubs always reveal CKSUM errors on the half that went away.
With b71 I foudn if I meticulously 'zpool offline'd the disks
before taking them away, the CKSUM errors didn't happen. With
b130 that no longer helps. so, scratchy unreliable connections
are just unworkable. Even iSCSI is not great, but firewire cases
sprawled all over a desk with trippable scratchy cables is just
not on. It's better to have larger cases that can be mounted in a
rack, or if not that, at least cases that are heavier and fewer in
number and fewer in cordage.
suggest that you do not waste time with firewire. SATA, SAS, or fuckoff.
None of this is an insult to your blingy designer apple iShit. It
applies equally well to any hardware involving lots of tiny firewire
cases.
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