Here is a link to the card.  Will it do the job of adding 4 more HDDs in a way that "unRaid" can use them?  IE: not RAID setups on the card it self.

 

http://us.startech.com/product/PCISATA4R1-4-Port-Serial-ATA-RAID-01-PCI-Card

 

Hope to hear from somebody soon.

 

Oddsodz

I do not know if that card will work, but before you shop for parts please educate yourself on the inherit limitations of the PCI bus.

 

The PCI Bus has 133 MB/sec maximum combined bandwidth for ALL devices on it. To determine the upper bounds, you take the total available bandwidth for the bus and divide it by the number of active devices. If you were to have 4 array drives your maximum upper bounds during those situations is 33 MB/sec [ 133 / 4 ].

 

The bus limit occurs in the following situations, during parity builds, parity checks, failed drive situation, drive rebuilds, simultaneous writes, and simultaneous reads.

 

I suggest no more than 2 drives total on PCI if you must use it.

Well PCi is as good as I am going to get for some time.

 

The Motherboard I plan to use does not have PCIe or SATA.  So PCi is where I am at.  And as I want to add 3 1TB drives very soon, I best get SATA in there somehow.

 

Would having 2 cards with just 2 drives alleviate some of the bottle neck?

Unfortunately not. The PCI Bus has 133 MB/sec maximum combined bandwidth for ALL devices on it.  It doesn't matter how you spread out the cards or drives. They all have to share the same bandwidth.

 

 

Ok,  thanks for your input.

 

I Now wonder if USB HDDs would be a better idea.  lol

Unfortunately USB drives are not supported as array drives. 

 

 

For $60 you can just buy a new motherboard that has 6 onboard SATA ports and then you won't need a PCI or PCIe card.  You may also need a new CPU and RAM, so your total investment would probably be more like $150.  Still, that makes far more sense to me than investing $60 in an obsolete PCI card that you'll want to replace soon anyway...