[OpenIndiana-discuss] Cram more drives into an HP xw8600

[Nikola M.]

On 07/24/14 07:34 PM, Philip Robar wrote:
> y short 1U case to my "external drives." The SATA spec says
> that data cables
I just think that is ludicrous to have one box where controller is and 
abother box where additional disks are and ,like, 16 SATA cables in 
between...
It sounds more like Mickey Mouse type of solution and not recommended 
not even for your basement...

Just grab Large ATX case with the space for many 5.25" and 3.5 drives 
internally
and THEN use metal enclosures within, to put as many 3.5" or 2.5" drives 
in it (maybe even hot swap who wants it), with good ventilation.
Anything else is ludicrous, against all recommendations (using internal 
cables externally... wish you luck..) and leads to dead data.

If one absolutely can not find big tower and 16 4TB drives are not big 
enough,
then maybe that setup is not ,like, any home setup and might think of 
buying a rack,
or just put another very big tower with many drives in it's basement.
But tower with PSU , motherboard, cpu, memory, system and many drives in 
ONE case.
> No, as I've explained above. Another option, though, would be to get an
> eSATA card and a drive case that supports port multiplication, but then you
> have to be aware of the throughput limitations of a shared data path.
I already said that is a bad practice to use any port multiplicators,
because of errors and problems with disk abstraction and data congestion 
that unknown chip impose on ZFS.
There were numerous problems observed and problems at the level of 
kernel and device drivers, problems that could not possibly solved 
inside illumos, because that are problems of those chips itselfs.
Point of ZFS is to use JBOD with regular SATA/SAS controler and drives 
(not SAS/SATA mixed) to lower your costs for storage, not to depend on 
some nasty RAID chips and not to depend on sanity of some unknown 
extender chips.

> Please read the reviews for this product at Amazon and Newegg. They are
> overwhelmingly positive.
As Wikipedia is saying, no public forum is the valid source for 
quotation, but an article.

With that kind of messy setup, one would be degrading what ZFS offers 
you (end-to-end data integrity with full speed of disks utilized), so NO 
cable extender chips and NO external enclosures with many SATA cables in 
between.

Yust buy a BIG ATX case with place for many drives and wire them 
internally to JBOD SATA controller.

If one uses ONE drive in external casing , connected to eSATA,
to say, Use Time slider option in Openindiana, to replicate dataset 
snapshots to external drive, that would be good enough.
Maybe even it would be good to use many eSATA cables in between many 
drives in external case/cases but that is eSATA, not SATA and excludes 
from using any port multipliers. And that sound a lot of more messy and 
expensive then just putting more drives in your storage PC.
So at the end of the day, if not using 'one disk per cable' and eSATA, 
that kind of external boxes are counterproductive to your data and suck 
more money from you without giving anything sane back in return to your 
ZFS storage pools.