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

[Jim Klimov]

On 2012-11-18 07:43, Paul B. Henson wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 17, 2012 at 03:13:03PM -0600, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
>
>> If the drive stalls indefinitely trying to recover a bad sector, then
>> there is a big problem.
>
> Yep. That's why I definitely don't want to go with consumer grade
> desktop drives. I think the WD Red is about the only "inexpensive" SATA
> drive out now that supports low TLER, the evil manufacturers seem to
> have wiped that tunable out of their consumer SATA firmware 8-/.


 From the marketing snippet posted on a local webshop, I see that WD
(or the shop?) recommends these drives in home/soho NASes of up to
5 bays, and they recommend enterprise drives beyond that. I have no
idea whether this is backed by mechanics (vibration, temperature,
etc. - resilience to which are already boosted in the Red series
in comparison to ordinary desktop drives, according to the article),
or by plain marketing.

On another hand, especially given the expected lower performance of
these disks and overall large volume, I'd go with raidz3 to be on
the safer side. But my wife turned down such a budget a few times ;)

I am not sure if there is merit in splitting parts of a raidz between
just two controllers - or if it is better to contain a TLVDEV (or a
whole pool) on one controller as separate failure domains, though.

HTH,
//Jim