[OpenIndiana-discuss] Another [OT] Hardware Post

[Russ Price]

On 02/21/2011 04:32 PM, Frank Middleton wrote:
> With the addition of an 1068E based 8 port (SASUC8I) controller, the
> H8SGL box has 14 direct SAS/SATA ports and is the basis for a pretty
> decent ZFS server, development machine and VBox manager with room
> for 10 3.5" drives, 8 hot swap, in a Supermicro 743TQ case.
>
>> Another thread on this liast reported some problems with Asus boards
>> and SAS/SATA HBAs. In a week or so I will receive a SuperMicro HBA,
>> and learn for myself if there is a problem.
>
> Other than SATA SSD boot disk, the ASUS box is basically diskless, so I
> can't speak for ability of either of the X16 slots to handle an HBA.


I'm running an ASUS M4A785-M with an Intel SASUC8I HBA, and it's been flawless 
with OpenSolaris b134, OI 147, and OI 148. I was a bit cheap with the RAM, with 
4x1GB sticks of ECC RAM, but it has performed well for me. I'm using all six 
onboard SATA ports, all eight ports on the HBA, and a SiI 3112-based two-port 
SATA card in the PCIe X1 slot.

Its integrated Radeon HD4200 only works the the VESA driver, but that doesn't 
bother me since the machine is my fileserver.