Am 21.08.2009 um 19:08 schrieb Peter Kjellstrom: > On Friday 21 August 2009, Joseph L. Casale wrote: >>> We have a few (p800). My opinion is that they're acceptable but >>> not fast. >> >> Heard this a few times now, in the interest of getting something >> better >> next time, what have you found equally reliable but faster? > > Nothing as cheap as a full dl185 that's for sure unless you count > SUNs thor > (thumper ng) machines but then you'll have to do the raid part in > software > somehow. Yeah, but that is as easy as zpool create tank raidz2 dev1 dev2 dev3 dev4 dev5 dev6 etc. zfs create tank/bigdisk But I'd go one step further and use one of SUNs OpenStorage devices. Once you have a lot of no-name JBOD SATA-drives, the inability of Solaris to light-up the yellow light of the broken one will make it painfully obvious that while one can spend to much on storage, one can as easily spend too little... ;-) If you really want to go with a HW controller, try Areca or the high- end 3Ware models. As mentioned in any ZFS document, when you use a HW-raidcontroller, the OS never knows if a drive is broken or showing errors. The HW hides that from the OS. You have to have closed-source drivers like the HP utils to tell you that. If your data-set will, over the lifespan of that server, never grow beyond the original size of the array, then you can go with a HW- raidcontroller. Otherwise, go ZFS. Rainer