On 17/06/2008, David Abrahams <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > on Mon Jun 16 2008, "Owen Townend" <owen.townend-AT-gmail.com> wrote: > > > Hey, > > James is right, the controller is the important part to consider > > here for compatability. > > > Duh, for some reason I didn't catch his drift before. Now I think he > was suggesting that I use a card with the same controller chip as my > onboard SATA because I know it works. (Sorry, James!) > > > > If you are only after sata ports and not hardware raid > > > That's me. > > > > then I'd suggest the Silicon Image SiL3114/3124 chipset cards (SATA > > I/II, four ports). They're supported natively by the kernel, so no > > third party drivers needed and I've seen them around for ~US$30/$60 on > > ebay. > > > That's a lot cheaper than some of the 3ware cards I've seen. > > > > The main drawback of pci sata is IIRC the maximum bandwidth of > > the pci bus is roughly 80 MiB/s. > > > Oof. I suppose there's no getting around a limitation like that > one... hmm, is there an SATA controller I can drive with firewire? What > people who care about performance do when their onboard SATA fills up? > Buy an external SATA drive cage that runs over firewire (or some such > thing?) > > > > If you're after hardware raid but haven't yet done your research I'd > > suggest reading the through adaptec's storage advisor[2] pages, they > > focus on the tech rather than adaptec specifics which is handy. > > > Well, I've done quite a bit already, but one can always do more > research. When is enough enough? I dunno, but I'm thinking maybe I > should stop here for now and invest the US ~$30/$60 to see how an > SiL3124 card works out. > >
Hey, Note, the 80 megabyte per second limit is a realistic limit given on the aforementioned adaptec pages IIRC. This actually quite close to the Firewire 800 limit ( 800 megabits per second = 800*10^6/(8*2^20) ~= 95MiB/s theoretical max). To get around the pci bandwidth limit the options are limited to PCI-E and PCI-X which should both give ample headroom. I've seen the SiL3124 chipset in both of these varieties, though they're a little more expensive. For me I've gone the PCI route as I was low on storage, not performance. HTH, cheers, Owen. -- ubuntu-server mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-server More info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ServerTeam
