ZFS is pretty quick, I lost my main system drive, installed a new drive and with one command (zpool import caprica (caprica being my raid name)) it was back up and running again (even all the shares set themselves back up).

Here’s the blog post I wrote about the hardware: http://blog.duklabs.com/?p=44

I don’t go too far into details about the setup though.

Ducky

That’s interesting to know. So it sounds that when I got around 73MBytes/second on my iSCSI test doing a backup, that I was getting about the best speed possible. However this was done on a small (4GB) group of fairly large video files. When doing a 650GB+ backup using iSCSI, I got around 48MBytes/second sustained transfer speed to a non-redundant pool over the gigabit switch, and this included a lot of smaller files, as well as large files.

Is the ‘trunking’ similar to ethernet channel bonding? I have 2 gigabit ports on this motherboard (Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe), so I considered looking into using both to give potentially higher throughput for video editing applications. See here: http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/Projects/MP_Lite/dox_channel_bonding.html

Another way to boost the speed is with trunking (802.???ad). You can get gigabit switches that support it for under $400 and Solaris 10 supports it with up to 4 (more?) Gigabit ethernet ports.