hardware for home use large storage

[Miroslav Lachman]

Dan Langille wrote:
> Daniel O'Connor wrote:

[...]

>> Why even bother with the LSI card at all?
>> That board already has 6 SATA slots - depends how many disks you want
>> to use of course. (5 HDs + 1 DVD drive?)
>
> Plus two SATA drives in a gmirror for the base OS, and one optical. I
> want a minimum of 8 slots.

I think that 2 HDDs in gmirror just for base OS is an overkill if you 
want this machine as home storage. You will be fine with booting the 
base OS from CF card or USB stick. (and you can put two USB flash disks 
in gmirror if you want redundancy)
This way you will save some money, SATA ports/cards and if you will use 
some kind of fast and big USB stick, you can use part of it as L2ARC for 
speeding up read performance of ZFS
http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2010/02/10/making-zfs-faster/

I have my backup storage machine booted from USB stick (as read-only 
UFS) with 4x 1TB HDDs in RAIDZ. It is running one and half year without 
problem.

Miroslav Lachman