ZFS Advice

[George Hartzell]

Wes Morgan writes:
 > I'm looking for information and advice from those experienced in building 
 > storage arrays with good performance.
 > [...]

I don't have any experimental data to contribute, but there are some
interesting hardware discussions on the opensolaris ZFS web site and
blog entries.

It does seem to be true that ZFS does best when used with simple
controllers, and a lot of the opensolaris community seems to like this
relatively inexpensive 8-port card (<$100 at newegg), it's apparently
what SUN ships in their "Thumper":

  http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AoC-SAT2-MV8.cfm

One of the opensolaris threads links off to this this blog entry which
discusses experiences with PCI-X and PCI-E cards, it might be useful.

  http://jmlittle.blogspot.com/2008/06/recommended-disk-controllers-for-zfs.html

The AoC-SAT2-MV8 is based on the "Marvell Hercules-2 Rev. C0 SATA host
controller", which seems to be AKA 88SX6081, which is listed as
supported by the ata driver in 7.0-RELEASE.  Has anyone had any ZFS
experience with it?

g.