[OpenIndiana-discuss] Building a machine

Wed Mar 9 09:29:53 UTC 2011

Howdy Gabriel,

That's a pretty awesome guide.  I dare say you've sold me on the ECC 
memory (once I can find it in suppliers around AU) but it's a shame I'm 
limited in the space I've got and need to stick with the mini-itx form 
factor and for the life of me don't think a motherboard supports ECC 
with LGA1155 in the mini-itx form factor.  Please feel free to prove me 
wrong though.

On 9/03/2011 7:38 PM, Gabriel de la Cruz wrote:
> Hi, with ZFS you dont need a raid card, ZFS will handle the drives on
> its own. However, if you are mirroring, the performance improves if
> both drives are on different controllers. Any controller supported by
> OI will do well for that purpose. I guess any PCI-E will do the job. A
> setup could be like this:
> Sata port 1 on the controller 1 and Sata port 1 on the controller 2
> will be a mirrored pool used for the system "rpool: c1d0s0-c2d0s0".
> The rest of the ports could make another pool for the data, either
> using another type of raid configurations, or keeping the mirroring
> concept; a single data pool made by 3 mirrors (DATApool:
> c1d1s0-c2d1s0, c1d2s0-c2d2s0, c1d3s0-c2d3s0).
>
> You should always make a memory test after purchasing memory, this
> will point out any hardware defects in the memory or you could even
> point out underlying problems with the motherboard. The same goes with
> hardrives, you should always take a look at SMART output messages and
> make sure if the drives are storing the data at the speed they are
> suppose to store the data. That way you can bring the faulty stuff
> back to the store before it is too late.
>
> Lets consider this situation: You are writing a file to a mirrored ZFS
> pool, the data is stored on both sides of the pool A and B. The drive
> A was faulty so it corrupted some bits. But next time you retrieve the
> data, ZFS is smart enough to know that A was corrupted so it reads the
> info from B and fixes A with the correct data. (Maybe drive A was not
> broken, but your faulty PSU was doing tricks.. but it was fixed)
> Super. But, lets imagine that you are storing another file, this time
> the memory does something funny (it doesn't need to be a faulty memory
> in order to do something funny, it could be produced by the
> motherboard as well) and some corrupted bits are written in both sides
> of the pool. Those bits will never be corrected. I dont think it will
> make any difference to back up the corrupted bits to CD once a week.
> Anyway, this is not as critical as it might sound, they are just a few
> bits, it all depends in what is the probability of corrupting those
> bits you really need :P The probability could be extremely small
> depending what kind of data you are handling.
>
> The point of failure would be the time when the bits are written to
> disk. You will anyway have ZFS snapshots, to roll back to earlier
> versions, and so on.
> If you are not running the system 24/7, maybe you can make a memory
> check from time to time, memory wont go wrong so easily over time but
> who knows, I have seen how some broken capacitors were affecting a
> memory check! (once upon a time, at the university we had to fix by
> hand about 30 DELL office workstations, once we replaced the
> capacitors memchecks came clean again!... low budget life! :D ).
>
> I personally dislike CDs, no phisical copy will last forever, and the
> ability of replicating the data is more powerful, specially when you
> can monitor hardrive failures as ZFS does. But thats a different story
> with no ECC (In that case replication could be a point of failure).
>
> There are many backup options out there, it all depends how
> complicated do you want your life to be; running amanda on a separate
> backup pool? e-sata drives as backup tape?  You can allways keep an
> external drive unplugged in your wardrobe...
>
> Anyway, taking risks is very necessary in order to move on, otherwise
> we would never go anywhere!.
>
> Remember that ZFS has amazing compression capabilities, consider ZFS
> in the backup media as well. And remember compressing the data uses
> processing power but it stores faster on the hardrive (less data to
> write), so if you are dedicating an processor just to the storage
> machine, remember to compress :D
>
> Cheers!
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 8:43 AM, Scott O'Brien<king.scott.2 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Wow thanks for all the replies.  The DH67CF looks perfect.  A few more
>> silly questions though, if I do a memory test before installing am I
>> right to use this considering it's non-ecc?  I'd still be backing my
>> important data up to cd once a month.  Second question is about
>> installing, is it considered bad practice to install the os on the
>> same raid pool as your data?  If so is there any pci-e sata
>> controllers anyone can recommend?
>>
>> Thanks once again,
>>
>> Scott o
>>
>> On 08/03/2011, at 11:42 PM, ken mays<maybird1776 at yahoo.com>  wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Scott&  Deano,
>>>
>>> You can use the Intel DH67CF motherboard. Everything is detected and works well for file server usage.
>>>
>>> ~ Ken Mays
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --- On Tue, 3/8/11, Deano<deano at rattie.demon.co.uk>  wrote:
>>>
>>>> From: Deano<deano at rattie.demon.co.uk>
>>>> Subject: Re: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Building a machine
>>>> To: "'Discussion list for OpenIndiana'"<openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org>
>>>> Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2011, 6:31 AM
>>>> Hi Scott,
>>>>
>>>> There is a HCL at http://wiki.openindiana.org/oi/Community+HCL that
>>>> might
>>>> have some suggestions, though don't think there are
>>>> any/many mini-itx boards
>>>> on there.
>>>>
>>>> Most boards seems to work well with OpenIndiana, especially
>>>> if on Intel
>>>> chipsets.
>>>>
>>>> Bye,
>>>> Deano
>>>>
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: Scott O'Brien [mailto:king.scott.2 at gmail.com]
>>>>
>>>> Sent: 08 March 2011 10:26
>>>> To: openindiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>>>> Subject: [OpenIndiana-discuss] Building a machine
>>>>
>>>> G'Day Everyone,
>>>>
>>>> First post on the mailing list.  I've just got a few
>>>> quick questions.
>>>> I've found a case I want to build a file server with (just
>>>> for home)
>>>> http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=25_1055&pro
>>>> ducts_id=14503
>>>> <http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=25_1055&pr
>>>> oducts_id=14503>
>>>> now I'm at a loss as to what mini-itx motherboard I should
>>>> put in it.  I
>>>> was kind of hoping for one of the new low power Sandy
>>>> Bridge CPU's but
>>>> can't find any on pccasegear.com.  Any advice on
>>>> motherboard and HD's to
>>>> get?  Any idea about how to tell with OpenIndiana
>>>> compatibility?
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>>
>>>> Scott
>>>>
>>>>
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