On 2014.02.08 11:09, tclug at freakzilla.com wrote: > The only idea I have is that using the system's built-in SATA to run eight > 3tb harddrives is not able to keep up with demands. So I'm thinking of > getting a nice SATA expeansion card to off-load some of the processing off > the CPU, hopefully that'll help. Do you actually have high CPU usage? I can have 8 disks doing scrubs at the same time (all connected via SATA) and not have CPU load issues (though scrubbing the root pool will of course make things slow because of the high I/O). > 2. I feel it should be seemless to move the ZFS pool/drive array from one > SATA connection to another. I this correct? The array uses two separate > SATA connections, but I figure worst case I plug them in in the wrong > order, it fails, I reverse them and restart and no problem. Is this > true? I don't want to nuke my ZFS pool... You can plug them in on an entirely different kind of controller and it won't matter. ZFS uses disk IDs. If you're moving them to a different system, then you'll want to export and import (and make sure the other system supports the features you have enabled), but otherwise, it doesn't matter at all.