[geeks] Nifty NAS board (Atom-based FlexATX from Supermicro)

[Lionel Peterson]

On May 21, 2009, at 8:19 AM, Mark Benson <md.benson at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 11:31 AM, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com 
> >
> wrote:

>> See above, the 4 Gig RAM would be nice, but 2 Gigs is OK. The  
>> "mature"
>> chipset and on-board graphics ensures good compatibility with most  
>> OSes.
>
> Except Solaris 10 :P I guess it works okay in OpenSolaris though which
> would suffice for most applictions.
> Regardless, I'm sure there are better, more modern Intel chipsets they
> could use that work as well as a 945 with the OSs it's targeted at.

What? OpenSolaris does run fine on this chipset, and I assume the  
RealTek NICs are supported, Solaris supports ICH7R (non-RAID), and  
GMA950 must be supported...

These are mature system chips, I would be floored if they aren't  
supported under Solaris...

>
>> OK, so your saying ZFS would benefit from additional RAM, that's  
>> what I was
>> curious about...
>
> Yeh, ZFS will basically use whatever is can find for Cache and 2GB is
> pretty much 40-60% used by the OS leaving only approx. 1GB for the
> Cache. On a system with 4GB you've got upwards of 75% of the RAM free
> to do that.
>
> The only other effective way I've seen mentioned of doing it, that
> might be practical on a 4-channel board, is use a SATA SSD drive for
> cache, it's something Sun have been getting excited about recently in
> arrays, and the facility is there in ZFS to use it, I don't know the
> full details though.

What about using a USB flash key for cache? The MB has a USB socket.

Lionel