brian89gp

They have just recently re-done the limits and pricing of vSphere 5 due to all the complaining. For the free version, changed from 8gb to 32gb. http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/08/vmware-capitulates-over-vsphere-5-pricing-kinda.ars

The PCIe card edge on the expander is only for physical mounting and power. It can be screwed to the side of the case and powered through the molex plug (ie, not plugged into the motherboard). There are no drivers, it is an invisible/silent device. It is similar to the SATA-SATA port multipliers you mentioned, only at a whole different level of speed and features.

$50 Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 Dual TV Tuner PCIe $50 Silicon Dust HDHR-US Dual Networked HD tuner $150 for the below 3 (have switched to XBMC): SageTV HD200 media extender SageTV v6 & v7 (upgrade) server license Quantity 2 SageTV Windows client licenses

Have the following for sale, cheaper then you can buy just the case for online. Will ship. $300 SuperMicro SC743T-645B tower case, 8 hot swap SATA drive bays with cages, 645w PSU Intel SHG2 dual Xeon motherboard dual 2.0ghz Xeon processors 4gb of RAM. 3-ware 9550SX-8LP, SATA-II PCI-X 8 port RAID card (can be set to JBOD to pass the drives through) Intel 4 port SATA PCI-X RAID card

All LSI SAS2008 controllers I know about, both in onboard and card form, are PCIe 2.0 x8. Should give 3Gbps (384MB/s) per drive (6Gbps x 8 channels / 16 drives). Just looking to postpone buying the RES2SV240 SAS expander until after I have 8 drives. According to Rajahal's comments here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=13094.msg124220#msg124220 it doesn't look like it will have any ill effects, since unRAID goes by serial number and adding the SAS expander at most will change the drive location ID. This is a new build. Motherboard is a SuperMicro X8DTH-6F, bandwidth will not be a problem.

I am getting a motherboard with the onboard LSI SAS2008 controller on it and will have less then 8 drives to begin with. Can I plug the SAS 2008 controller directly into the backplane, set up unRAID, and then sometime in the future add an Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander (SAS 2008 to Intel SAS expander to the drives)? The drives would be moved from being directly plugged into the controller to being plugged into the Intel SAS expander. Will unRAID handle this and just recognize the new arrangement of drives?

Does the dual port SAS2008 card show up as one device for VMDirectPath or is each port a different device? Ie, one port to unRAID server #1 and the second port to unRAID server #2.

I am guessing better parts, better burn in, and more love/attention from the manufacturer. We have been getting a lot of 2tb 7200rpm SAS drives (Dell calles them nearline something or another) and they have been absolutely rock solid. These are on 24tb arrays that there is about 6tb written/written over in a week, so no lack of activity.

After having a handful of Linksys/Dlink/Netgear switches overheat and start dropping packets or worse and burn out completely, I got a 8 port HP switch. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833316076 I bleed Cisco green through and through, but for an unmanaged gigabit switch the HP line is both affordable and reliable. They also have a POE powered one which is pretty cool in my book. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833316155

Where I work, they bought 200+ 750gb Seagate 7200.9 drives for a handful of backup-to-disk arrays. I can attest to what WeeboTech says, they do fail in batches. We were having 5-10 drives failing within a few days of each other, then having several months of no failure, then another 5-10 drives failing at a time. Over 4 years about 25% have failed. Of those 25% that were replaced, 50% of the reman drives they sent as replacements for the warranty failed. On the other hand, they bought 45 750gb Seagate ES drives, not one failure in 4 years.