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Case with 9+ hard drives & OpenSolaris/ZFS advice

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bork:
Whatever controller you get...

Look at the chip-set on the card, most use the Silicon Image chip, and find out the Bios rev its running.  Make sure that the Bios on the Sata controller can handle what you want it to do correctly; check if there are any updates to the Bios to fix problems found in the earlier Bios rev's.

A controller I had bought has the Sil3114 chip on it and by using the Silicon Image's Site found that there is a revision for the RAID bios.
http://www.siliconimage.com/support/faq.aspx follow to support.  There is also a version of the Bios for their chips that has no RAID capability if you just what plain disks, depends on what you want it to do.

I have also found that some controllers out of the box do not have a Bios on them that will recognize disks 1T and over, computer freezes at boot-up or just does not see the disk.  A lot of controllers have been on the shelf long enough that you could run into this problem and you will need a Bios update to resolve this.

In doing you updates - Run the update programs in DOS, stay away from the Window update method.  Create a Free DOS boot disk and put the put the update software and the image file on a second disk.

Cheap controllers - stay away from Sabrent.  Whatever they did to make their controllers make it impossible to rev their bios.  Spent almost two days on trying to get on to work before chucking the card and keeping the cables.  Off the shelf, they will not handle a drive larger than 1T.  My preference for Sata controllers are the SATA II from SIIG.

Possible configuration you might want to look at if you are slot limited on the mother board, both use the Silicon Image chips.
SIIG SATA II PCIe controller - http://www.siig.com/ViewProduct.aspx?pn=SC-SAE012-S2
Sata port multiplier, one for each controller port - http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm-e.asp
The port multiplier can also be installed into a second chassis, running a eSATA cable from the chassis with the controller.  A two case design were the you have a mother board in one and the disks in the second.

If you are running RAID under software, the system will need to be running before it can mount the RAID.  You will need one disk that is not part of the RAID that has everything needed to allow a full start up (boot, swap, /, /dev, ...). 

geoffreak:
@bork
Thanks for the tips, but that controller card is limited to a bandwidth of 250MB/s due to the one lane PCI Express. This is fine for two hard drives, but multiplying the ports will just slow down everything a lot.
I will keep a port multiplier in mind though.

bork:
If your doing a file server, your limited to Ethernet speeds of 100Mb/s on 100Mb/s Ethernet and about 250Mb/s on a 1G (with a one lane PCI card).  Assuming your running desktop hardware and not server class hardware.

Also your disks can not sustain a read/write speed of what that SATA cable is capable of, there is a fair amount of idle time on the cable while transferring data with a disk.

geoffreak:
While you are correct that I will not be able to access it as fast as I can read it, when using ZFS it would be necessary to have fast internal speeds for data maintenance.

_Jitsu_:


50 disc raid anyone? :D

Terryfying contraption.

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