February 4, 200818 yr Hi, I just wondered what people are using currently for extra sata connections. I have filled the 8 onboard ones, so need a card. Is anyone using a PCI-E card at all ? Need to find something which is easily available in the UK. Thanks Matt
February 5, 200818 yr Here are two links to look at: The wiki: http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware_Compatibility#PCI_SATA_Controllers - from memory, the first one is by far the most popular with Unraid. A similar thread that offered PCI-E choices, but has no recent replies (you can tickle the post to get folks to look at it again): http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=642.0 Cheers, Bill
February 8, 200818 yr I saw a reference to this one in reading though the forums. SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009 Currently $90 w/ free shipping. It is a PCI-X card, but also works in a PCI slot. It is has 8 ports, not 4 - all SATA300. I also saw a reference to being able to run 2 of these in the same system - that would max out drives in unRAID. I have an older P4 MB with 4 SATA150 ports, and was thinking of getting either one of these or a $60 Promise TX4 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816102062). The TX4 is a 4 port card, and is PCI only (no PCI-X option). For $30 more, I'm leaning towards the Supermicro.
February 23, 200818 yr quick noob question. do you have to put drivers for these cards somewhere on your USB for them to work?
February 23, 200818 yr quick noob question. do you have to put drivers for these cards somewhere on your USB for them to work? They are already there as part of Tom's release for most of the popular chipsets.
February 24, 200818 yr I see some of you using a SATA150 controller vs. a SATA300. Most, if not all, SATA drives these days seem to be SATA300. I know the difference between the two standards has to do with the throughput to and from the drives but is a SATA150 controller adequate to handle SATA300 drives in an array?
February 24, 200818 yr SATA150 is underused (by nearly half), so I'd say yes. Interface and other technology aside, it can be compared to the ATA66/ATA100/ATA133 that preceded SATA. IDE drives never really reached 66MBps, and so all other upgrades were theoretical upgrades. In the case of port multipliers and other technology that allows SATA to share a bandwidth on a single channel, it may come into play, but not for a single drive. When used in an array, the bandwidth of the bus that controller resides on (PCI/PCIe/PCI-X) is more important. One concern with older SATA150 cards may be that they do not support some of the newer technology included with current SATA300 drives (like NCQ).
February 26, 200818 yr One concern with older SATA150 cards may be that they do not support some of the newer technology included with current SATA300 drives (like NCQ). They also typically don't support a drive activity LED except via extra jumper wire, if that's important to you.
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