From: Nick Pettefar (Nick@Pettefar.com)
Date: Thu Mar 09 2006 - 19:09:19 EST
I had a number of replies to my question, unfortunately most of them
were about using USB or else told me that it was impossible.
I have found a company making a SAS controller (Serial Attached SCSI)
card that also allows SATA (Serial-ATA) drives to be used and has
Solaris SPARC drivers: LSI Logic.
They say: "The SAS3442X, PCI-X, 8-port 3Gb/s Serial Attached SCSI
(SAS) HBA has 4 internal and 4 external ports and can be connected
directly to 8 SAS and/or SATA hard disk drives. Each port delivers up
to 300 MB/s bandwidth (600 MB/s full duplex) for a combined throughput
of as much as 2.4 GB/s (4.8 GB/s full duplex)"
Best price I could find on the net was $300 unfortunately, but this
still makes the complete solution much cheaper than SCSI and is much
faster than USB. 2 x 250GB SATA drives is about $300, making the
whole project about #600. Cheapest big SCSI drive I could find is a
refurbished Maxtor 300GB for $495 + postage from
discountechnology.com.
There is another company making SATA solutions for SPARC Solaris
machines: Sun! Their new Ultra-45 workstation uses two 250GB SATA
drives. Also the Sun Fire T1000. I guess they know how to make it
work - I wonder who's controllers they use. Anybody?
I'm still not sure about setting up a mirror using SATA drives. One
person said it wouldn't work and yet I see various references to this
on the 'net. Anybody?
Nick
On 28/02/06, Nick Pettefar <Nick@pettefar.com> wrote:
> We have a small web/file server which is running out of data disk
> space (it will soon need to store more than the mirrored 120 GB IDE
> discs I fitted can hold). The machine is performing admirably and I
> don't want to change it unnecessarily. It is running the latest
> Solaris 10. I have been putting off this upgrade but now it is
> becoming critical!
>
> Is it possible to fit a SATA PCI controller card and use SVM to make a
> mirror of two 250 GB SATA drives? This would keep us going for a
> couple more years at least. Have any of you any experience of such a
> set-up?
>
> Regards,
>
> Nick
> --
> Nick@Pettefar.com DoD 1069 MAG 73516 ZZR11 R90s VFR750
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