[OpenIndiana-discuss] sata port multiplier?

[Ray Arachelian]

On 05/25/2011 05:21 PM, Matt Connolly wrote:
>
> Sounds like an almost identical setup to what I have. Although I'm using a Si3114 card. I have AHCI enabled in the bios, so my drivers are:
>
> Silicon Image si3114 = pci-ide
> Intel SATA Controller = ahci.
>
> And, if you do find a miniPCIe SSD, please do share, I'd be interested in this too.
>
>   

I bought this one: 
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167039

I haven't yet installed it, but I'll do it this weekend. :)

My biggest problem is that I turned on dedup, and I find the dedup table
size is over 8GB, while the box has only 4GB and can only allow half of
the memory to be used.  Of course any write operation is now insanely
slow.  Hence the need for the SSD.  I also scripted up find and md5 and
sorted out the output and I'm slowly deleting the duplicate files, but
it's still insanely slow.  Hopefully the SSD will make that problem go
away and deletes of the dupe files will go faster.

Before this machine I kept my stuff on USB drives.  Each year or so I'd
get a newer, larger set of USB drives and transfer the contents over,
that way I'd avoid data loss caused by lost sectors, etc. and still have
the old drives as a backup to the previous set.  I'd recyle the old old
set as needed. 

Of course I wasn't super careful and some of the drive sets had dupe
files on them, so the dupes added up.  When I built this NAS box,  I
figured ZFS handles dedupes, so why not throw all the files to the nice
NFS server and let it sort out the dupes. :-D  Until one day it got
insanely slow....

I had a Si3114 card in there, but it wouldn't work at all with
opensolaris (I'm guessing it now works under oi148?), so I spent a few
more bucks and bought a 3124 which works fairly well - not fast, but
then again the drives are WD20EARS, so I don't expect it to fly. 

Of course, I upgraded it to oi148.   Oh well.  I guess I'll find
something else to do with the 3114, or ebay it or something.

The next step, after the SSD install and cleanup of the dupe files is to
do a zfs send backup of the whole array to a couple of 2T USB drives,
wipe it and realign the partition table so I get rid of the 4K alignment
issue as well, which, this being initially an open solaris 134 install,
it's certain to be suffering from.