[OpenIndiana-discuss] SSDs for ZFS Pool?

[Sašo Kiselkov]

On 08/24/2012 05:53 PM, Bryan N Iotti wrote:
> Sorry to reopen an old post, but I have some questions I can't seem to
> find an answer to myself...
> 
> I recently caved in and bought an LSI 3041E-R HBA, which I reflashed to
> Initiator Target firmware, the latest version available. I have my usual
> two 2TB SATA drives attached directly via SATA. I have encountered
> Illumos bug #1787 as described here:
> https://www.illumos.org/issues/1787
> 
> Would installing a SAS-To-SATA interposer card on each disk clear this
> error, or would it still act the same way? I mean, if I understand
> right, this bug affect only SATA drives on SAS controllers.

My personal recommendation would be to always use interposers when using
SATA disks in SAS environments. I have a Sun J4200 JBOD with twelve
Sun-branded Seagate 1TB SATA disks (with interposers) and smartctl works
just fine on these.

> Should I just cave in once more and buy some SAS disks, if SMART is so
> important to me?

If you already have the drives, then interposers are cheaper, however,
if you're buying new, then I recommend going straight for SAS drives.
These are generally only around 10% more expensive and in all may be
even cheaper than the SATA+interposer combo (though it depends on which
tier of SATA drives you're buying, beware that there are massive
differences between consumer-grade SATA and enterprise SATA drives).

Cheers,
--
Saso