Hardware suggestions (ICH9R/G33/JMicron JMB363)

[Johan Ström]

Hi list
I sent a similar mail to freebsd-hardware last week, not very much  
response there though so i resent here with some more details..

Im about to build a new machine wich will mainly be used for offsite  
backup. My plan is to run 7.0 and use ZFS on a number of regular SATA- 
discs (some mixed I've already got and more to be bought later).
Anyways, the suggested hardware list is the following right now:

Gigabyte GA-G33-DS3R, G33, 8x internal SATA (6x ICH9R + 2x on jmicron  
JMB363 from what I can find on net, gigabyte themselfs call it  
"Gigabyte SATA2")
Intel Pro/1000PT PCIe Desktop Adapter 1000BaseT
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 2.67GHz 1333Mhz Socket LGA775, 4MB
2x1GB 1066MHz memory  (another 2 1gb woudl give me max 4gb, but that  
should realy be enough for a fileserver.. so no 2Gb sticks here,  
cannot find any for pc8500 anyway)

The mobo was featured on one of the mailinglists (dunno which it was)  
a while back, it was said that it worked good. However there seems to  
be some known problems? ICH9R and SATA ATAPI devices seems to work  
poorly. Is this only ATAPI or is there any risk that this would  
affect regular disks too? I realy dont want to have disk troubles  
again, my history with ie nforce mobos and onboard controllers suck..  
If these problems absolutly only affects CD-drives (ATAPI) then I  
realy dont care, but would be nice to know if there are any risk that  
this affects disks too.  (reference http://groups.google.com/group/ 
muc.lists.freebsd.current/browse_thread/thread/7ae0e00567961d26)

The Intel network controllers should work good too right? From list  
history it sure looks that way..

For the ZFS part (maybee wrong list), I was thinking of going with  
zmirrored vdevs (currently I got 6 disks, 3 pairs of different size/ 
model) in one big pool, and when adding capacity I will probably add  
pairs of drives (new zmirrored vdevs in the zpool)

Well, thanks for any opinions or suggestions! If you got any  
recommendations about other similar mobos then I'm all ears!

--
Johan Ström
Stromnet
johan at stromnet.se
http://www.stromnet.se/