Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

While, it isn't set in stone....I started leaning towards the idea of going with Linux as the OS to install on this system. Pretty sure it'll work, while Solaris might not. And, it isn't like I'll be playing around with ZFS/raidz in the immediate future.

But, then today I took a peek inside the machine to see what kind of expandability options I might have. I was mainly looking to see how the internal drives were setup and how many additional drives I could mount in it. And, what kind of slots it had.

Well, looks like there two PCI, PCI-e x1, and a PCI-e x16. Not sure what I'll stick into the slots, but have some ideas. The internal harddrive bay...is just room for one more, no SATA cable for it...so I'll need to buy one. Though lots of extra power connectors. There's an open 5.25" bay which I could adapt...and there's that portable drive bay which I'll probably never use.

But, what threw me is that there are 6 SATA connectors on the motherboard....that's just screaming for me to eventually try raidz. Plus today at work I tried plugging my flashdrive into my sun workstation, and it worked....so maybe Solaris might get along with whatever personal stuff I want to do with it. Used to be BOINC would've been a deciding factor....since there are only two projects (SETI@home and BOINCsimap) that run on Solaris x86, and both require work. I don't remember how I managed to build the BOINC client, but haven't been able to upgrade....because I haven't been able to successfully build anything since. But, with BrandZ zones....I'm running other BOINC projects at work....and could do the same at home (though not sure how many more months before I get the machine up).

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