Sun Microsystems makes new releases of Solaris about every four to six months, in many cases all the new release contains is bug fixes and some changes in functionality. More often than not most releases go by without a great deal of fanfare. Just as Solaris 10 3/05 broke new ground with Zones, Dtrace and the Service Management Facility. Solaris 10 6/06 introduces ZFS or Zettabyte File System and the SATA framework and Xorg 6.9, which will be the primary focus of this review.
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Member since:2005-10-09
The funny thing is, none of our drives are capable of 300mbit/s, short of burst from cache. It's all moot. 
I don't understand this demand for SATA2. Once we have media that can actually USE the additional bandwidth, I'll understand - but as SATA/SATA2 is per-drive, and not shared, the BW is far more than sufficient even for 15k drives.
Member since:2005-08-08
Well, actually all my drives are capable of 300Mbit/sec, which is 37.5MB/sec. I guess we confused MB with Mbit; SATA 3Gb/sec can go up to 300MB/sec.
That said, cache burst speed is somewhat important for me as my drives can transfer over 200MB/s from cache. So why limit them to 150MB/sec? Of course this speed difference is barely noticeable except in certain occasions.
The real reason why I want SATA 3.0 Gb/sec is not because of the bandwidth, but because of the features it brings compared to SATA 1.5 Gb/sec, such as NCQ, HotPlug, Staggered Spinup, Port Multiplication, Port Selection, eSATA and xSATA. Plus, why choose a standard from 2002 when you can choose one from 2005, if it works?
Member since:
2005-08-08
Solaris 10 06/06 also has SATA framework support for Marvell 88SX60xx and Marvell 88SX50xx based HBAs using the marvell88sx driver.
I wanted a cheap SATA2 300Mbit/sec controller card supported at this speed in Solaris using the native SATA framework. After looking around, I chose the Supermicro AoC-SAT2-MV8 card, less than $100 for 8 ports.
I hope in the future we'll see more support for SATA2 controllers.