redux: 48 or 96 sata3 paths ... specific ZFS hardware proposal

[Daniel Kalchev]

On Sep 22, 2011, at 20:45 , Jason Usher wrote:

> But the X8DTH-6F motherboard seems too good to be true ... it has 7 8x pcie slots, and further, has two sff8087 connectors onboard with the EXACT SAME LSI chipset as the 9211-8i cards above - so you can get an extra 8 drives on this motherboard using the same driver.  Takes xeon5500/5600 (6core, potentially) at 6.4 QPI ... so, very modern there.

I have a system working with this motherboard and Supermicro E16 extender. There were some strange behavior with the expander when using the version 9 firmware, but that was just as it was published and no Supermicro version existed --- it might be ok now: the ses device showed 4 times and sometimes drives were replicated as well. I guess that might be related to the mps/expander combination (at that time). It works fine with version 7 firmware.

How many LSI cards do you intend to use? You may wish to look at the architecture (CPU/chipset/PCIe interconnects) in order to make more informed decision. 

Daniel