I’ve been busy in Andy’s cave, configuring one of the low power 40 Watt, HP ProLiant MicroServers, as the “Skynet SSDSuperSAN”. The first issue which I came across is that because I want to use ZFS for the underlying SAN “filing system”, yes I know FreeNAS 0.7 and 8.0 has ZFS support, and FreeBSD also has ZFS support, but the most current versions of ZFS exist in Oracle Solaris 11 Express, Nexenta Project and OpenIndiana, and the last two are based on open Solaris. So I’ve decided to pick my very old friend Solaris. (personally, the king of all Unix versions, IMHO!).
A big issue, 18 hour installation time to a 4GB USB HP 165w flash drive, okay so I only have to do this once, but 45 minute boot time, so I scrapped the USB installation. (and if you asking why I’m not using FreeNAS, well I might entrust Squeezebox Server to FreeNAS 0.686, 0.7.1, (don’t get me started on 8!) but seriosuly! iSCSI/NFS, stability of FreeNAS is pants!).
Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Internal SATA III 6 Gb/s 6xBay 2.5" HDD into single 5.25" Bay
So not wanting to lose any capacity from the MicroServer, and keeping the existing four SATA 300 drive bays empty, I found the Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Internal 6-Bay 2.5″ hard disk, 5.25″ Bay. And as this was available from my favourite supplier on the Internet, Scan Computers International Ltd, whom I’ve been purchasing from since the late 80s, I thought this would give me the ability to boot Oracle Solaris Express 11 from standard 2.5″ SSD/Notebook drives in a conventional mirrored rpool, also gives me another 4 free SATA 2.5″ slots for SSD/Notebook drives for the future. Hence why I needed to do the HP ProLiant MicroServer firmware tweak!
Here is the final HP ProLiant MicroServer
HP ProLiant MicroServer with Sharkoon SATA QuickPort Internal SATA III 6 Gb/s 6xBay 2.5" HDD into single 5.25" Bay installed
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