I'm looking for a motherboard for a network-attached storage box. I plan on running Solaris because I want to use ZFS. Unfortunately, Solaris currently only supports two SATA chipsets, marvell88sx and sil3124 (both typically found on PCI-X devices). Other chipsets are only supported in PATA emulation mode. I don't want to pay a fortune, so I'm looking at emulating PATA until Sun releases more SATA drivers. My problem is I've heard some BIOSs don't have a setting for PATA mode.
What I need is a board with one of the supported chipsets listed above, or a board I can be sure will offer PATA emulation. I want support for 4 SATAII drives, AMD's 64-bit extensions, onboard video (doesn't have to be fast), and I'm hesitant to pay more than $100 (although I'd be willing to pay a little more for a board with a natively-supported chipset). I'm hoping to get a cheap (less than $200) dual-core CPU, and the icing on the cake would be virtualization extensions. Another factor I've been considering is that Sun will probably release native SATA drives for nForce chipsets before Intel chipset because they sell nForce-based servers. For these reasons, I've been leaning towards AM2/nForce430, but LGA775/945* might also be an option.
What I need is a board with one of the supported chipsets listed above, or a board I can be sure will offer PATA emulation. I want support for 4 SATAII drives, AMD's 64-bit extensions, onboard video (doesn't have to be fast), and I'm hesitant to pay more than $100 (although I'd be willing to pay a little more for a board with a natively-supported chipset). I'm hoping to get a cheap (less than $200) dual-core CPU, and the icing on the cake would be virtualization extensions. Another factor I've been considering is that Sun will probably release native SATA drives for nForce chipsets before Intel chipset because they sell nForce-based servers. For these reasons, I've been leaning towards AM2/nForce430, but LGA775/945* might also be an option.
