Karanbir Singh wrote: > 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. I'd imagine that a x4540 setup as md nested raid1+0 should give the dual Areca a run for its money (okay...not quite in real money terms but you get the idea) and I wonder what zfs would be like on a dual Areca 1220 box. > > the thumpers make for decent backup or vtl type roles, not so much for > online high density storage. I wonder how much that would change with a bbu NVRAM card for an external journal for ext4 and the disks on md. Unless one cannot add a bbu NVRAM card...