[geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Francois Dion <francois.dion at gmail.com>
>Date: 2007/08/10 Fri AM 09:17:04 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Recommendations for Home-Use RAID

<snip>

>Get a PC, get a pair of SATA controllers (man marvell88sx to find what
>cards work at top performance w/solaris, that's the chipset found in
>thumper), and since you want to use PATA drives get SATA/PATA
>adapters. I get them at a local store for about $7, I'm sure you can
>do better online.

Wouldn't that cost you all the great improvements in the new SATA driver framework [0] since they are not actual SATA II drives?

> Install Solaris 10 U4 (out officially in two weeks
>or so).

Cool, first I've herard about it - I was wondering when the next update was due...

> man zfs. depending on how you want to do this, and how many
>drives total, you could go raid-z w/hot spare, or raid mirror+stripe.
>It is one command line with zpool. Then create whatever zfs
>filesystem(s) on top of the pool. You can auto share with samba
>through the zfs command when you create the filesystem or later. You
>can of course add nfs if you need it. You now have your own homebrew
>Thumper.

Or you could use a bunch of USB 2.0 drives, like that video I posted a while ago (Sun group in Germany video taped it and put it on the web) [1]

>The advantage is that your data wont get silently corrupted like they
>can with Raid-5 or anything else out there (been there, done that,
>lost a lot of digital copies of my vinyl records that took forever to
>convert - the files looked ok, the os, backup program etc never saw it
>coming, silent corruption all the way to my backup).
>
>> and I'd like to significantly improve my write
>> performance.
>
>zfs w/ fast controllers and enough ram is pretty darn good. What kind
>of throughput do you need? Sustained? What kind of data? Video?

I'd like to try that - that looks good - I wonder how it would work on, say, an Intel MB with their latest SATA controller (ICH8?) - I just built a box with one the other week...

Ken

[0] Lida Horn's blog at Sun - http://blogs.sun.com/lidasblog/entry/sunfire_x4500_sata_driver

[1] CSI:Munich video - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8100808442979626078