Best pci Sata controller?

Messiah Khan

Messiah Khan

Messiah Khan

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Im after a cheap 4 (or more) port PCI (not Pci-E or Pci-X) Sata controller. the cheaper the better as long as it will run ok and reliably. I don't need raid, just simply more Sata ports. Any suggestions? Will bandwidth be badly effected going through Pci?
 
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If you don't need RAID then to be honest any old PCI SATA card will do. There are 4 port Silicon Image based cards going at auction for ~£15 all in.

There is a bandwidth limitation using PCI but you won't see it unless you access a pair of drives on the card simultaneously.
 
Cheers rpstewart. Im wondering if its worth me getting a raid card just incase. Do you know if Openfiler does software raid? I've spotted a "Adaptec 2820SA SATA 8-Port 128MB Raid 5 Controller Card" for a decent price. Would this be a good choice?

Im planning on having a old pc (733mhz P3, 256mb ram etc) in a X-Case RM 420 rackmount case with PATA OS drive (~10-20Gb) running Openfiler then 8x500Gb drives for storage to start with. Im hoping to have all the storage drives in RAID5. Is this possible with Openfiler or should I do it with the controller card? With this combo will it be easy to assign all the drives to the same volume, then as I get more drives, simply slot them in, add them to the raid set and expand the volume on to the drive?
 
Messiah Khan said:
Would it give a big performance hit over using hardware raid? Also is volume expansion nice and easy (see my second post)?
Click to expand...

Yes, but it'll be faster than the network with enough drives. You will be able to expand the array (Online Capacity Expansion) but it will take a very long time indeed, same goes for rebuilds - this is the downside to software RAID. :)
 
AbsenceJam said:
Yes, but it'll be faster than the network with enough drives. You will be able to expand the array (Online Capacity Expansion) but it will take a very long time indeed, same goes for rebuilds - this is the downside to software RAID. :)
Click to expand...

Ok, cheers for that. When you say long time indeed, what sort of time can I expect on an 8 drive array?
 
Difficult to give an accurate answer as it will depend on the speed of the box underneath it. What I can say is that it took me 8 hours to extend a 7*640Gb RAID5 array to an 8*640Gb array on a Highpoint RR2320 which is an accelerated software card. It's not unreasonable to expect that full software will take 2-4 times as long
 
Messiah Khan said:
Ok, cheers for that. When you say long time indeed, what sort of time can I expect on an 8 drive array?
Click to expand...

Well because specs vary and the like it's impossible to be specific but with the sort of machines most people go with and drives on the PCI bus it can take a matter of days to expand or rebuild. It's done online though so you're not shut out completely and if you're wanting to store media on there for playback that wouldn't be a problem as nothing is beyond 50Mb/s.
 
Slight change of plan. I now need the sata controller card to have 8 ports or more and can be PCI or PCI-X. Not too bothered about RAID capabilities. I've spotted an Adaptec AAR 21610SA (16 port) and an Adaptec 2820 (8 port) card for decentish prices. Are there any other models I should be looking at? Any no-frills (But reliable) 8/16 slot cards?
 
I've just bought the Adaptec AAR-1420SA 4-Port SATA-II RAID Controller and seems alright, altough took 8 hours to create a 400GB RAID 1 :(

I have to create another 1TB RAID one tonight :( :(

Other RAID cards I've had it would let you boot into Windows and carry on building in the background; these ones don't seem to let you!
 
Cheers Dangerous. I think im just going to go with the Adaptec AAR 21610SA. My only concern is that i've heard the card is limited to 2TB volumes. Does anyone know if this is only with the hardware raid? If it supports 2TB+ volumes (Mine would be 3.5TB to start with, rising to about 9.5TB eventually) when using software raid in openfiler then im good to go. My problem is that I will need a total of 20/21 drives, which if I go with a 8 port controller card is 3 pci slots taken up, plus I need one for the Gigabit ethernet card and I think the mobo I have only has a total of 3 pci slots.
 
AbsenceJam said:
Initializing the array doesn't take as long as an expansion or rebuild.
Click to expand...

Cheers. I don't mind it taking too long as I can set it off doing its thing over night.

Messiah Khan said:
Cheers Dangerous. I think im just going to go with the Adaptec AAR 21610SA. My only concern is that i've heard the card is limited to 2TB volumes. Does anyone know if this is only with the hardware raid? If it supports 2TB+ volumes (Mine would be 3.5TB to start with, rising to about 9.5TB eventually) when using software raid in openfiler then im good to go. My problem is that I will need a total of 20/21 drives, which if I go with a 8 port controller card is 3 pci slots taken up, plus I need one for the Gigabit ethernet card and I think the mobo I have only has a total of 3 pci slots.
Click to expand...

Right, ive taken the jump and gone for a Adaptec AAR 21610SA. Now I just need to wait until payday and for the X-Case RM 420 to come back in stock. Also need a decent but cheap PSU to power the drives.

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:D
 
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