On 2008-03-19, Michael S. Peek penned: > > This would be fine, I don't really care if it's a hardware or > software RAID, although it seems like a waste of money to buy a > hardware RAID card just to use as a dense SATA controller. Is there > such a thing as a SATA controller just for lots of drives? One that > supports, say, 8 or more drives and is supported by the linux kernel > out of the box? All I really want is to be able to have big-time > data density in a single machine.
Commentary from my husband, who is a storage geek: [quote] Mine is relatively small... only a 4-port setup, 2 internal/2 external. For native linux support, the LSI MegaRAID controllers are open source and part of the kernel, there's no 3rd party driver to install. Something like this has 8 internal SAS/SATA ports and is about $300. It appears to be out of stock, not sure if it's been replaced by something else or is just a big seller: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118092 You'll want at least one PCIe lane for every two drives as a minimum for decent performance. A 4-port PCI-e x1 controller card is cheap, but can't get anywhere close to saturating 4 disks. [/quote] -- monique Help us help you: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]