Jorgen Lundman wrote:
I only have a 32bit PCI bus in the Intel Atom 330 board, so I have no
choice than to be "slower", but I can confirm that the Supermicro
dac-sata-mv8 (SATA-1) card works just fine, and does display in
cfgadm. (Hot-swapping is possible).
I have been told aoc-sat2-mv8 does as well (SATA-II) but I have not
personally tried it.
Lund
I have an AOC-SAT2-MV8 in an older Opteron-based system. It's a
2-socket, Opteron 252 system with 8GB of RAM, and PCI-X slots. It's one
of the newer AOC cards with the latest Marvell chipset, and it works
like a champ - very well, smooth, and I don't see any problems. Simple,
out-of-the-box installation and works with no tinkering at all (with OS
2008.11 and 2009.05).
That said, there's a couple of things you want to be aware of about the AOC:
(1) it uses normal sata cables. This is really nice in terms of
availability (you can get any length you want easily at any computer
store), but it's a bit messy compared to the nice multi-lane ones.
(2) It's a PCI-X card, and will run at 133Mhz. I have a second gigabit
ethernet card in my motherboard, which limits the two PCI-X cards to
100Mhz. The down side is that with 8 drives and 2 gigabit ethernet
interfaces, it's not hard to flood the PCI-X bus (which can pump 100Mhz
x 64bit = 6400 Mbps max, but about 50% of that under real usage)
(3) as a PCI-X card, it's a "two-third's" length, low-profile card. It
will fit in any PCI-X slot you have. However, if you are trying to put
it in a 32-bit PCI slot, be aware that it extends about 2 inches (50mm)
beyond the back of the PCI slot. Make sure you have the proper
clearances for such a card. Also, it's a 3.3v card (won't work in 5v
slots). None of this should be a problem in any modern motherboard/case
setup, only in really old stuff.
(4) All the SATA connectors are on the end of the card, which means
you'll need _at least_ another 1 inch (25mm) clearance to plug the
cables in.
As much as I like the card, these days, I'd chose the LSI PCI-E model.
The PCI-E bus is just superior to PCI-X - you get much less bus
contention which means it's easier to get full throughput from each card
One more thing: I've found that the newest MLC-based SSDs with the
newer "barefoot" SATA controller and 64MB or more of cache are more than
suitable for use as Read cache, and they actually do OK as write-cache,
too. Particularly for small business server machine (those that have
have 8-12 data drives, total).
And, these days, there's nice little funky dual-2.5 drives in a floppy
form-factor things.
http://www.addonics.com/products/mobile_rack/doubledrive.asp
Example new SSD for Readzilla/Logzilla :
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_summit_series_sata_ii_2_5-ssd
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
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