[OpenIndiana-discuss] building a new box soon- HDD concerns and recommendations for virtual serving

[Carl Brewer]

G'day,
I'm going to be building a new home/small office server soon, with ~24GB 
or so of RAM and hopefully 6-8 TB of ZFS mirrored storage, as well as a 
couple of 1TB HDDs for a ZFS root partition.

It's going to run Virtualbox to virtualise a Linux (CentOS 5) and 
Windows SBS 2003 server on it, thus the heaps of RAM etc. I will also be 
using it as a native CIFS fileserver (and maybe whatever Apple uses 
natively for file serving these days? It's been quite a while since I 
did any Mac networking, who remembers Localtalk? ....) - eventually 
going to shut down the SBS 2003 server and run most of its jobs.  The 
SVS server is just a fileserver and exchange, I don't need AD or any of 
that garbage and we're going to ditch exchange ASAP!  If it proves to be 
stable enough I'm also going to virtualise a NetBSD box on it 
(historical baggage) and bring my local hardware count down to 1 
physical server.

I know there's been discussion of large block sizes with modern SATA 
HDD's (I was planning on using off the shelf Seagate Barracuda desktop 
drives, they're cheap and fast enough for this box).  Am I likely to run 
into any problems with modern drives with OI's current beta release? 
I'm running oi_151a7 and hoping to keep doing so unless there's a better 
illumos based distribution for my purpose?  It's not really going to 
need much in the way of a GUI, but I do like having an X11 desktop 
occasionally to work with the VB console.

Suggestions? Advice?

thank you

Carl