[OpenIndiana-discuss] hardware specs for illumos storage/virtualization server

[Jim Klimov]

On 2012-11-17 17:17, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> Prices I have seen this year for Enterprise SAS and SATA drives did not
> show a large bump in price for SAS as compared with SATA (maybe only
> $20-30).  Other than the SAS controller, there is not much extra cost
> for SAS as compared with SATA

I think, speaking about "ridiculous pricing" the OP meant Consumer SATA
versus Enterprise SATA and SAS. While the latter cost about the same,
they are often twice or more as expensive as the former, for the same
vendor's sibling model.

Then again, we are ourside the black box and have little idea what we'd
actually overpay for, if both devices are rated roughly the same on the
badge (i.e. 24/7, years of warranty, etc.) When you pick the disks up
by dozens, the multiplied margin is large enough to worry about - and
to want to save quite a few bucks.

 > General concerns for the new rig

On a side note, expect the USB3 ports on modern hardware to not work
with illumos-based OSes, until someone comes up with any sort of USB3
driver (there was talk of a tedious project done "right" in order to
use the ports at full speed, and of a possibility to stick support on
existing framework and suffer lags - but do use the ports while waiting
for the better solution). So, if USB is of any concern to you, make
sure to have some USB2 (USB1? ;) ports available on the motherboard or
an addon card. Otherwise not even a mouse lights up on a USB3 port...

HTH,
//Jim