On 2/3/2011 12:38 PM, Chuck Munro wrote:
Less than $500 for a Supermicro box? Holy crap, Batman!
I'm using one of their motherboards (X8DAL-3) in a home-brew configuration, which has turned out to be somewhat less expensive than a factory-built Supermicro, but still not cheap. I'll say one thing for them ... they do make really nice stuff, with little extras the commodity makers like Asus or Gigabit don't include. Well worth the extra dollars. This box just screams, so it should handle KVM very nicely if I organize the arrays properly ... anyone with RAID-60 advice please chime in.
I took Les' advice and built a connection map of the 15 drives. The Disk Utility GUI turned out to be useful once I determined the SATA breakout cable order and labelled each with its PHY number. Knowing that lets me use the GUI to clearly identify a failed drive, which shows up as a PHY#. I'm normally a command-line kinda guy but this utility is something I really like on RHEL-6. I hope it's the same on CentOS-6.
If you are building your own stuff, I kind of like trayless hot-swap sata bays. And if you care more about size and power than speed and capacity, you can get them for laptop size drives too.