[geeks] Solaris RAID: Time for storage

[Lionel Peterson]

On Mar 13, 2009, at 3:31 PM, der Mouse <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG>  
wrote:

>>> Of course, reliability is more important than speed, so it's
>>> probably not a big deal.
>> Nothing will be faster than the card slot you plug the controller
>> into.
>
> Well...unless you're doing disk-to-disk operations and the controller
> is smart.  I remember reading over a vendor command-set document for a
> SCSI drive once, and it included a command which would cause the drive
> to act as initiator, read blocks from other drives on the same bus,  
> XOR
> the blocks together, and write them to its own platter - obviously
> intended for RAID applications.  Since as I understand it SATA is a
> point-to-point asymmetric technology (versus SCSI's symmetric bus),  
> the
> details would differ, but something very similar from the host's point
> of view could be done.

That's a very smart controller - it sounds more like a mainframe I/O  
Controller than a RAID card...

Lionel