Brad Campbell wrote:
I'd love to do something similar with PCI-E or PCI-X and make it go
faster (the PCI bus bandwidth is the killer), however I've not seen
many affordable PCI-E multi-port cards that are supported yet and
PCI-X seems to mean moving to server class mainboards and the other
expenses that come along with that.
Recently I was looking for a budget solution to exactly this problem,
and the best I found was to use 2-port SiI 3132 based PCI-E 1x card
combined with 1:5 SATA Splitter based on SiI 3726 (e.g.
http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/products_id/1245).
Unfortunately I didn't find anyone selling the splitter here in Czechia,
so I went with 4-port SiI PCI card, which is performing well and stable,
but of course quite slow.
Some test I googled up at that time suggested that this combo can get
about 220MB/s bandwidth through in real life (test was on Win32 though),
so at today's drive speeds you can connect ~4-5 drives to one PCI-E
without bus bandwidth becoming the limiting factor.
Anyway, for really budget machines I can recommend the PCI SiI 3124
based cards, the driver in kernel is working rock-stable for me. Only
grudge is that driver doesn't sense if you disconnect a drive from SATA
connector, i.e. when you do that, computer will freeze trying to write
to disconnected drive. After ~3 minutes it times out and md kicks the
drive out of the array, though.
If someone has any experience to share about SiI 3132+3726 under linux,
I'll be happy to hear about it. According to
http://linux-ata.org/software-status.html#pmp it should work, question
is how stable it is, since it is recent development.
Petr
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