On 01/08/2010 12:53 AM, John R Pierce wrote: > Christopher Chan wrote: >> Yes, the Sun Fire X4540 uses software raid but not necessarily zfs...if >> you install another operating system that is not Solaris or OpenSolaris, >> it won't be zfs. >> > > the thing to note on the Thumper (X4540), each of those 48 SATA drives > has its own channel to the system bus. I believe it uses 6 8-port SATA > controllers, each attached to the Opteron's Hypertransport via > PCI-Express x4. this means you can hit some really high aggregate IO > speeds... have you actually tried it ? cause when I did - the x45xx's/zfs were between 18 to 20% slower on disk i/o alone compared with a supermicro box with dual areca 1220/xfs. the thumpers make for decent backup or vtl type roles, not so much for online high density storage. - KB