One of my current "projects" is to install a Solaris server at home. My colleague, Constantin already has one for some years an has already written several blog entries about it. Yesterday, at the MUCOSUG meeting, he gave us an interesting presentation about his findings so far. In the talk afterwards, I also learnd about some pieces of hardware wich are better suited than others. I will post my findings here for me as a reference and in case someone is interested. ;-)
- The AMD Phenon is a good CPU, it takes more power than an Intel Atom, but if you also count the power for the chipset, it probably takes less power. And of course, it's 64bit, which is recommended for ZFS (speeds up the calculation of the 64bit checksums)
- If not much more expensive, I would prefere ECC-protected RAM
- The Intel ethernet network cards are very good supported by Solaris drivers (e1000g)
- For SATA-Controllers, the LSI ones have good drivers
