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...