[OpenIndiana-discuss] sata port multiplier?

[Matt Connolly]

On 28/05/2011, at 7:08 AM, Ray Arachelian <ray at arachelian.com> wrote:
> 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. 

The si3114 card required the bios to be flashed as not raid, only then did it work in oi as a straight die device. Mostly works well, the only thing I've found is that cfgadm doesn't recognize it so if a drive fails on a si3114 port, you will need to cold reboot the machine to see a replacement. (no not swapping). 

> 
> 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.

Sounds just like what I've done recently, except I zfs send straight from one drive (was previously mirrored) into a freshly made raidz pool with 4k alignment. I'd consider not using dedup given the cheap price of storage these days combined with limited ram in on that mobo. As in, the performance hit for the saved disk space wouldnt be worth it for my needs.
> 


Best,
Matt