On the heels of last week's post asking about hardware recommendations, I'd like to ask a few questions too. :) I'm considering my first SAS purchase. I'm planning to build a software RAID6 array using a SAS JBOD attached to a linux box. I haven't decided on any of the hardware specifics. I'm leaning toward this PCI express LSI 3801e controller: http://www.lsi.com/storage_home/products_home/host_bus_adapters/sas_hbas/lsisas3801e/index.html Although, Adaptec has a similar PCI-X model. I'd probably purchase a cheap Dell rackmount 1U server (e.g. PowerEdge 860) for the controller. It has dual Gb ethernet, which I'd channel bond for decent network I/O performance. The JBOD would ideally be 1U or 2U holding 8 or 10 disks. If I understand SAS correctly, I'd probably have a unit with 2 SFF-8088 miniSAS connectors (although, I believe these connectors only support 4 devices, so if the JBOD is >8 disks, I don't know what would happen). I'm completely undecided on the JBOD itself; recommendations here would be greatly appreciated. It's a bit of a shot in the dark. I'd appreciate feedback and suggestions on the hardware above, or a discussion of the performance. (E.g. a discussion of SAS ports/bandwith, PCI express lanes/bandwidth, disks and network to determine the through put of this setup.) Cheers, Richard - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
