[OpenIndiana-discuss] Sun Fire

[Udo Grabowski (IMK)]

On 21/06/2013 14:58, Gary Gendel wrote:
> I have a possibility of picking up a decommissioned X4340 (thumper) w/o
> disks to replace my aging V20z ( and multiple external drive stacks
> cheap.  It looks like it should be supported by looking at the HCL.
>
> Is there any gotchas I should be aware of before I commit to purchase?
> Is there something more modern I should be looking at instead?
>
These are absolutely marvellous machines, we have seven of them
and NEVER had any problems. You should consider using enterprise
server sata drives, since the desktop variants have problems
with read and write speed given the vibrations in that box (we
tried that...), they also die earlier. You can use up to 2 TB
drives, the controller would not see more than 2 TB, but usually
accepts higher capacity drives. Choose a raidz1 with 5 drives per
vdev, each drive on a different controller, balanced over target
numbers, striped over vdev groups. Consider using SSDs for cache
and log, that will speed up your NFS operations. Mirror root_pool.
I can only recommend the X4540, these are the best workhorses
I've ever seen, and it's a pity that there's no useful successor
for that price/capacity ratio that runs under OI/illumOS.