Following on from my previous post on my file server, here is what
I’m now looking at. It’s based upon various discussions on mailing lists and IRC channels.
- Samsung SATA CD/DVD Burner $20 (+ $8 shipping)
- SuperMicro 5046A $750 (+$43 shipping)
- RocketRAID 2300 PCIe 4x SATA $120 (+$8 shipping)
- Crucial 3x2G ECC DDR3-1333 $191 (+ $6 shipping)
- Xeon W3520 $310
Total price in cart: $1389.95 + $52.95 shipping = $1441.90
Not included: HDD, which will be my next task.
Regarding #3, above, did you read some of the Newegg comments? This might affect your choices of disks.
No, I hadn’t. But looking at them now, they appear to be RAID related issues. I will not be using this card for RAID. I will be using it only as a SATA straight-through controller (aka JBOD). No RAID at all. All RAID will be done by ZFS via RAIDZ.
What do you think now?
I think Highpoint is good stuff, I use a lowend RR and it’s been great. Everything I use is UFS2 so I can’t comment on the ZFS angle. I’m *very* pleased with gmirror except that I had to leave 8.0R to get the fixes for the bad performance mentioned elsewhere. I’d give it (ZFS) a shot if I was building something today with more than two disks in a volume but everything is built and I’m not messing with it unless it breaks. I simply don’t trust Seagate. Others swear by it. Pick your poison. We have a couple 1U Supermicros at work. They work but sound like jet turbines. Looks like a nice project, have fun.