Sorry my first post is a question (or several questions), but I'm planning an upgrade to my home SAN. For the past 4 or so years I have run Solaris on an old Sun workstation, and 5, 2tb SATA drives formed a single RAIDZ1 storage pool. It has run brilliantly, but recently the hardware has become less reliable (not the drives). A few weeks ago I got the first corrupted data, 32kb cleaned up by my monthly scrub, due to a spontaneous reboot.
At the same time I am planning to replace my desktop--a 10 year old MacPro1,1 that I have upgraded to 8 cores of 3ghz Xenons and lots of RAM. Normally it's limited to 10.7, but I have installed the hacks to run 10.11 (El Capitan). So my thought is to see if I can make this machine my new server. In addition since a significant chunk of my 8tb is movies and music that I have ripped from my very large collection, I have run VirtualBox on the Solaris machine to run windows and iTunes to act as a server to my AppleTV. Migrating to hosting ZFS on a Mac would mean I could skip the virtual machine, and run iTunes directly.
Unfortunately the Mac Pro has no way to host the 5 SATA drives, so I've been looking at 5 bay, all in one enclosures with JBOD mode. These seem to come in eSATA or USB3 versions, neither of which the Mac Pro has natively, meaning I'll have to buy a PCIe adapter. Below are some questions that I haven't found real clear answers on:
- The Solaris OS is pretty old and not updated, so presumably the version of ZFS on my pool is older than current OpenZFS. Will this cause any problems importing, or is this a simple import, followed by upgrade?
- It seems like CIFS/SMB/NFS on my Solaris box is implemented as part of the filesystem. Will those shares move with the export/import, or should I disable them and use the Mac OS level file sharing?
- I have a couple of iSCSI block devices in the pool. The only info I found on this is "it should work". Has anyone worked with iSCSI on the mac ZFS?
- I'm trying to determine whether I should use USB3 or eSATA. I'm guessing eSATA is less overhead, but it requires that my eSATA PCIe card is ok with port multipliers. I read somewhere that OSX requires 10.8.5 to support port multipliers, but I've also read some people complaining about port multipliers, and eSATA in general. Does anyone have any experience with SATA port multipliers on OSX? I've heard worse things about USB with ZFS, so I'm leaning towards eSATA. Is that generally the better option?
- As a single user, with at most two or three client apps (AppleTV streaming, desktop, laptop) and a 5 drive RAIDZ1, would 3gbps SATA be sufficient, or should I ensure that I get 6gbps? The drive interfaces are 6gbps, but they are fairly slow 5400rpm ECO drives.
- Finally, based on what I explained above, are there any gotchas, or should the drives easily be seen, USB or eSATA, and respond to an import?
If it helps, this is currently the hardware I'm looking at:
eSATA PCIe card:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet% ... ATA6PROE2/ - Sonnet specifically says this card supports port multipliers, but states that 10.8.5 is necessary.
USB3 PCIe:
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet% ... /USB34PME/
Drive bay: There are two enclosures I'm considering. This:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product - This one supports both USB3 and eSATA, which would be nice for flexibility, but the eSATA is only 3gbps. Or this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product - This is eSATA only, but is capable of 6gbps.
The enclosures are kind of cheap--unfortunately--as I do not have a lot to spend on this project. I'm trying to make do without spending a lot.
Thanks, (and sorry for the wordiness.)