The new box came together after I scored a good deal on several 3U Chenbro chassis that included rails and a redundant PSU. The full components list includes:

• Chenbro RM31212 3U Rackmount Chassis
• Intel Xeon E5620 Westmere 2.4GHz Quad-Core CPU (x2)
• Supermicro X8DTH-6F Motherboard
• Crucial 4GB DDR3 PC3-8500 DIMM (x8)
• OCZ Vertex 2 40GB SATAII SSDs (x2 for mirrored zfs system pool)
• Intel X25-M 80GB SATAII SSD (L2ARC read cache)
• Hitachi 7K2000 SATAII Hard Drives (x6 for raidz2 mirrored zfs data pool)

The Supermicro motherboard has dual SAS2 ports onboard that posed a small challenge for the Chenbro case, but it was nothing a little bit of dremel tool action couldn’t solve. Other than that everything went together well and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I have plenty of room for expansion with six additional hot-swap bays, four additional memory slots, and seven PCI Express slots. This bad boy is running NCP 3.0.1 along with most of the newer packages I’ve been backporting. It should be able to handle quite a large number of zones and VirtualBox VMs among other things.

Here are a few pictures I took after everything was assembled:

Fortunately there is a simple, relatively inexpensive way to use SSD drives with your Thumper. Here’s what you need:

You’ll also want a spare X4500 drive bracket unless you’re willing to use a bracket from the drive(s) you have to pull out. Insert your Intel X25-E SSD into the Icy Dock, attach the Icy Dock to the X4500 bracket like any 3.5″ drive, and insert the result into your Thumper. Voila. The Icy Dock bay is well constructed despite being plastic (I would prefer it was made out of aluminum). Also, $20 for a hunk of plastic and a converter isn’t ideal, but those of you that would suggest duct tape have no sense of aesthetics.

In my case, I swapped out two 1TB drives for two 32GB Intel X25-E SSDs. I then partitioned the SSDs into two slices, one for mirrored system disks and the other for ZIL. They show up and work just fine:

platform = Sun Fire X4500

Device    Serial        Vendor   Model             Rev  Temperature
------    ------        ------   -----             ---- -----------
c0t0d0p0  E002PAJTBX4E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 28 C (82 F)
c0t1d0p0  E002PAJTBWTE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 30 C (86 F)
c0t2d0p0  F002PAJSY2AF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c0t3d0p0  F002PAJSV5BF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c0t4d0p0  E002PAJTBX1E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 28 C (82 F)
c0t5d0p0  E002PAJTBWME  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 32 C (89 F)
c0t6d0p0  F002PAJS156F  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 34 C (93 F)
c0t7d0p0  F002PAJSW14F  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c1t0d0p0  E002PAJT4VLE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 29 C (84 F)
c1t1d0p0  E002PAJTBWWE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 32 C (89 F)
c1t2d0p0  F002PAJSZP2F  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c1t3d0p0  E002PAJT5BUE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c1t4d0p0  E002PAJTBX7E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 28 C (82 F)
c1t5d0p0  E002PAJTBX3E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 31 C (87 F)
c1t6d0p0  F002PAJS1DEF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c1t7d0p0  E002PAJT541E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c5t0d0p0  E002PAJTA8WE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 28 C (82 F)
c5t1d0p0  E002PAJTAJ0E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 31 C (87 F)
c5t2d0p0  E002PAJT50KE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c5t3d0p0  E002PAJTB9LE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c5t4d0p0  E002PAJTAGME  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 28 C (82 F)
c5t5d0p0  E002PAJT58JE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 31 C (87 F)
c5t6d0p0  E002PAJT52TE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 34 C (93 F)
c5t7d0p0  E002PAJT4UNE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c6t0d0p0  140067032HGN  ATA      SSDSA2SH032G1GN   8850 255 C (491 F)
c6t1d0p0  E002PAJTAJ6E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 30 C (86 F)
c6t2d0p0  F002PAJSZNEF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c6t3d0p0  E002PAJTBH7E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c6t4d0p0  1400CB032HGN  ATA      SSDSA2SH032G1GN   8850 255 C (491 F)
c6t5d0p0  E002PAJT120E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 30 C (86 F)
c6t6d0p0  F002PAJS79AF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 32 C (89 F)
c6t7d0p0  E002PAJT5UZE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 34 C (93 F)
c7t0d0p0  E002PAJTBVJE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 29 C (84 F)
c7t1d0p0  E002PAJTAJ3E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 31 C (87 F)
c7t2d0p0  E002PAJT53ME  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c7t3d0p0  F002PAJSZNDF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 34 C (93 F)
c7t4d0p0  E002PAJTBL8E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 27 C (80 F)
c7t5d0p0  E002PAJTAK4E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 31 C (87 F)
c7t6d0p0  F002PAJS56AF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 32 C (89 F)
c7t7d0p0  F002PAJSAW1F  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c8t0d0p0  E002PAJTAHTE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 28 C (82 F)
c8t1d0p0  E002PAJSRR8E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 31 C (87 F)
c8t2d0p0  F002PAJT7YAF  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c8t3d0p0  E002PAJT4W9E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 35 C (95 F)
c8t4d0p0  E002PAJT583E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 28 C (82 F)
c8t5d0p0  E002PAJTAG8E  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 31 C (87 F)
c8t6d0p0  E002PAJTBATE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 33 C (91 F)
c8t7d0p0  E002PAJT52UE  ATA      HITACHI HUA7210S  A90A 34 C (93 F)

Updated: 2010/04/02

The high temperature shown for the SSDs is simply due to Sun’s hd utility not comprehending the return values properly. This is probably due to non-Sun firmware or lack of SSD specific awareness but it does not affect operation. There have been other reports of problems with FMA marking the drives as faulty (which may or may not bother you), but the most recent Intel firmware seems to have resolved this. I have been running these SSDs in two X4500s for nearly a year with no problems.

The full components list includes:

• Chenbro RM31212B 3U Rackmount Chassis including a 460W Zippy PSU
• Intel Core i7 920 Nehalem 2.66GHz Quad-Core
• Crucial 6GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM (PC3 10600) Triple Channel Memory Kit
• Supermicro MBD-X8SAX-O Intel X58 Server Motherboard
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3120813AS 120GB 7200 RPM Sata Hard Drive(x2 system drives)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3250823AS 250GB 7200 RPM Sata Hard Drive (x6 data drives)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 ST31000340AS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive (x6 data drives)
• SYBA SD-SA2PEX-2IR PCI-e SATA II card (x2)
• Supermicro AOC-SAT-MV8 (x1)
• Ancient Matrox PCI video card

platinum.alloy.net serves up audio/video/photos/etc. to two hacked AppleTV boxes, my wife’s iMac, and my Mac Pro via Samba. It also serves up home directories for the Sun Ray thin-client in the kitchen and acts as a backup server for our Macbook Pro laptops.

It has been through a number of incarnations over the years. I picked up the Chenbro case off eBay a year or so ago for around $350 which was a steal, considering they run upwards of $800 new. The motherboard, CPU, memory, and 1TB drives are new as of December 2008 (early Christmas present, yay!). Everything else I’ve had for a couple of years and it’s been the usual organic upgrade process. The Supermicro MBD-X8SAX-O motherboard is so new that I must have been the first one to buy it off Newegg. The price for the new motherboard/cpu/memory dropped about $100 less than a week after I ordered, and I hadn’t even received the parts yet. Typical! I tend not to be so bleeding edge and only upgrade every three years or so, but the timing was right and Nehalem was calling me in my sleep.

I was previously using a Tyan S2865G2NR board with a 2.2GHz AMD Athlon X2 and 4GB of Crucial memory. There was nothing wrong with this other than it didn’t have enough PCI-X or PCI-E slots, and socket 939 is getting a bit long in the tooth. The upshot is that I can get ~$200 out of the old parts on eBay and recoup some of the bleeding edge cost.

Upgrading to the new motherboard was mostly straightforward, although I had to do a manual dist-upgrade to the latest NexentaCP unstable since the OpenSolaris b85 kernel had problems booting. I burned NexentaCore 2.0 Alpha1 and used the recovery grub option to login, mount my syspool, and fix things. I’m in the process of migrating all the data off the six Seagate 250GB drives which are attached to the AOC-SAT-MV8. This card has had a lot of problems with ZFS and has been discontinued by Supermicro in favor of the AOC-SAT2-MV8. Whenever I expand beyond six disks, I’m going to skip straight to the AOC-USAS-L8i using mini-SAS to SATA cables.

So far the new board/cpu/memory appear stable, and it’s been serving up WALL-E repeatedly to our three year old for a few days now. It’s nice to see Hyperthreading giving us what appears as 8 core bling:


# psrinfo -v
Status of virtual processor 0 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:47.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 1 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:51.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 2 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:51.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 3 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:51.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 4 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:51.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 5 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:51.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 6 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:51.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.
Status of virtual processor 7 as of: 12/15/2008 22:56:39
on-line since 12/14/2008 18:22:51.
The i386 processor operates at 2660 MHz,
and has an i387 compatible floating point processor.


I’ll work on benchmarking this home-grown thumper after the New Year. The next upgrade is to install four Intel X25-M SSDs for the ZIL and L2ARC caches. Given the cost I think I’ll wait awhile this time.

Chenbro has announced a new mini-itx home server/NAS chassis that would make for a super small, super quiet OpenSolaris ZFS storage server. Couple this with an MSI Industrial 945GM1 Core 2 Duo Mainboard, 4GB of memory, a 2.5″ system disk, four 750GB or 1TB data drives, and a cheap four port PCI SATA card, maybe an SD card or two for the slog, and you’ll have yourself a mini-thumper. The only con for me is the single system disk, although there are creative solutions around that.