[OpenIndiana-discuss] Expanding storage with JBOD

[Edward Ned Harvey (openindiana)]

> From: Dave Pooser [mailto:dave-oi at pooserville.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 7, 2014 12:22 PM
> 
> Sans Digital makes one-- their part number TR4M6GNC, selling at NewEgg for
> $134.99. I'd never use one myself, because they seem to be a recipe for
> weird flakiness and I/O hangs, and ZFS does not deal well with SATA kinda-
> sorta-maybe failure modes. But they exist.

Thanks for pointing that out.  Interestingly, the product I was looking at was the Sans Digital ES104T, which is just a chassis power supply, and four ESATA pass-thru cables going to the individual drives.

I know ZFS works fine with SATA in general, as long as there isn't some junky SATA chip or driver in the mix.  So the flakiness you described might be on a different product, or it might be introduced by the SATA multiplier in that system.  The aforementioned ES104T, I would have absolute faith in, because it's literally brainless.   ;-)   And hence comes with the disadvantage of requiring the 4 separate cables.