Onboard SATA controller vs Promise TX4

[turbodeas]

Hi All,

First post - just wanted to say what a fantastic product Nas4Free is - I've learned so much and had so much fun - my first foray into the world of unix-based and servers.

For the last year or so, I've been running a raidz1 config with 4 1tb drives through a Promise TX4-300 PCI card in to my Intel D945GCLF2 Atom 330 board, with 2GB of RAM..... Got read SMB speeds of ~65MB/s, which I'm fairly pleased with, all things considered......

Before anyone says it, this is a project system - I'm aware I shouldn't use ZFS without ECC memory, but my data is not massively important to me and I have very little cash.

Anyway, I have just bought an 'upgrade', an Intel D2700MUD board and 4GB of RAM. This also has an intel NIC, and uses less power, so I'm hoping to get similar/slightly better speeds.

What I'm wondering is, would I be better off hooking up 2 of the drives to the onboard SATA controller, and 2 to the Promise PCI card? In my head, this doubles the available PCI bandwidth to the drives. Or should I keep all 4 connected to the Promise card? I'm just not sure if this would cause any issues with the RAIDz1?

My other question, and I'm aware this may not be the correct subforum, is what's the best way to upgrade the mobo and keep the data in tact? It's embedded on a USB stick, so theoretically I should be able to just hook everything up and plug the USB in, no? Do I need to export/import my pool?

Thanks in advance everyone!

Turb.

[b0ssman]

yes you can connect them to different controllers and in your case this should give you a slight increase in speed.
however the limiting factor will still be the pci bus. since this is limited to a theoretical max of 133mb/sec (in reality its below that).
The onboard controller does not go through the pci buss and you will get more speed.

in a raidz1 if any of the controllers malfuntion 2 drives will drop out and your entire array will stop working until the drives are connected again with no sync issues since the entire array was offline.

[erico.bettoni]

If the promise is not PCI express you should plug all of the 4 drives on the motherboard!
Doesn't matter where you plug your drives, zfs will know which one is which. If you move them around just go in disks -> management and clear config and import disks, so the gui displays correct information.

Just plug your usb in the new mobo, you don't need to do anything else.
If you're running a version older than 1310, backup you're config, do a clean install and restore it.

[b0ssman]

his motherboard does only have 2 sata ports. so its very suboptimal for a nas.

[turbodeas]

Thanks for the replies! Very helpful advice.

I wish I could plug all 4 into the mobo, but it's only got two ports. Beggars can't be choosers! One day, I'll find something cheap with 4 ports. But for now, like I said, this is just really a messaround system - nothing important.