I'm wanting to know if any 8 port SATA PCI-E controller cards are supported?

Want to run a card in my PCI-E X16 graphics slot on my AB9 Pro. I want the fastest parity checks possible.

 

(I'm interested in the answer to this as well.  I don't know of any at a reasonable price.  There is an Adaptec 4 port card that requires a PCI-E x4 or faster slot at ~$110 that I am watching to go on sale.  There is an 8 port PCI-X card from Supermicro that runs ~$100 that many unRAID users - including me - use.  Although a PCI-X card, it runs fine in a PCI slot)

 

New users should know that incredibly fast parity checks are not the end all of unRAID performance.  Parity check puts the ultimate stress on the I/O bandwidth.  It is running locally (no network bottleneck) and is accessing all the drives at the same time.  Even on the fastest I/O busses, parity checks on large arrays take hours to complete.

 

But real-world access patterns are quite different.  The speed at which data can be read via the network is limited by your gigabit network.  Having more than a few streams is pretty rare for more users.  The difference in (non-parity check) performance between PCI and PCI-E is small if any for most users.  Trying to run multiple streams from the same drive is not going to be improved.  In short, disk controller bottlenecks are rarely a limiting factor in real world applications.

 

I understand that most people (me included) want the best performance in all aspects - for parity check as well as future benefit.  But if you are contemplating spending big bucks for an 8 drive PCI-E x16 contoller, realize that it is not going to make much difference right now.  I run parity calculation once a month - and it completes in an overnight cycle.  Having it run in half that time would not be a huge deal to me.  (I have a 10 T array with 8 drives on the MB, 5 on the SuperMicro via PCI bus, and 1 IDE drive + another IDE drive as cache)

bjp999: Thanks for the info on the time for parity checks on your 10TB system.

 

Anyone: I still would like to know if any 8 port PCI-E cards are supported yet?

Thanks

bjp999: Thanks for the info on the time for parity checks on your 10TB system.

 

Anyone: I still would like to know if any 8 port PCI-E cards are supported yet?

Thanks

 

Me too. preferably PCIe 1x

I still would like to know if any 8 port PCI-E cards are supported yet?

 

A better question would be are there any affordable 8 port PCIe cards available yet

 

 

I suspect we are all waiting for Silicon Image to get on the ball.  If they would come out with a low cost SiI3138 chipset, that would answer our needs perfectly.  But I believe most of the drive controller chipset makers think that anyone wanting that many drives also wants built-in RAID support, which of course makes it much more expensive.  Maybe we need to make more noise, let them know there's a market for a SiI3138 type chipset (same as the SiI3132, but 8 SATA II ports).

Is anyone willing to try port multipliers... two port multiipliers one SIL3132 card would cost about $200 for 10 drives.

I just found a pretty good deal on the Adaptec PCI-E x4 card (see good deals section).

 

While I was looking, I found the following 8 port adapter that costs about $280.  Depending on your needs, you might consider this "affordable" as compared to ~$700 for other similar cards like this.

 

LSI LSI00151 (PCI-E x8 (or faster) slot) - $280 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118092

 

***I do not own this card and cannot endorse it***

 

***I DO NOT KNOW IF IT WOULD BE COMPATIBLE WITH UNRAID OR NOT (but thought I'd post and others may know) ***

 

>> Two internal miniSAS connectors – 2 x4 SFF8087

 

Requires a special cable... but also becomes neater as it is a single cable to the card that fans out near the end to the drives.

I wondered about that, but after reading this documentation

 

http://www.lsi.com/documentation/storage/hbas/sas/lsisas3081E-r_pb_fin.pdf

 

thought that it had what was needed to connect to SATA or SAS drives.  Either that or the documentation is really misleading.

 

Anyone buying should double check before ordering.

 

WeeboTech, do you think this controller would be directly supported by unRAID?

I don't see any SCSI drivers natively compiled into the kernel. Therefore I would assume the kernel would have to be compiled with SCSI support and/or a driver will be needed.

It's also questionable how much support you'll have with from SATA over SAS. It's not that you cannot use the drive. It may be that low level control that hdparm provides may be unavailable.

I know SATA drives on my Adaptec SAS controller are detected but the kernel does not see them yet.

I believe there are drivers to allow them to be seen, but there's some firmware issue. So I have not been able to get them working yet.

 

It's like the whiole port multiplier thing. Delving into uncharted territory.

No mention of JBOD, so unRaid might see it as a single drive (Raid).... 

 

I think it does.  Look at the PDF file  It says that it supports "Internal JBOD enclosures" (in the left bulleted lists of features). 

 

It also includes this statement in the text:

 

It also offers leading SAS and SATA RAID and non-RAID data off-load for medium to high-capacity internal server storage applications.

I have not met a raid controller that didn't support JBOD. so I'm sure it will work one way or another.

I remember an old issue on a TYAN S2505 whereby the promise controller did not support JBOD, so we configured a single drive as a RAID0 drive.

 

The real issue is kernel drivers and how they drives are seen to the OS.

I will be going the port-multiplier route in July and I've done quite a bit of research to make sure it will work with unRAID the way it is intended.  I've contacted SiliconImage, as well as the maker of the external enclosure that includes the PM module, to verify that the drives will appear individually to any OS and they said they would.

 

Specifically, this is the PCI-E card I plan on using and this is the enclosure.  I've ordered a 4-bay eSATA enclosure from them already and they are of very good construction.

 

I wish I could get it in sooner to give feedback, but needs and funds are both lacking for the moment.

I have not met a raid controller that didn't support JBOD.

 

Well I have... I have two 6 port PCI cards of an I don't recall manufacturer ( ) that advertised jbod support but it's only 2 drives jbod

 

 

What's good about that enclosure is you can add another Drive Bay and another sata module.

 

I happen to like this one.. mostly because it uses trayless removables.

http://www.cooldrives.com/saiipomu55hd.html

I thought about swapping them out (or getting just the enclosure) and using the 2in3 modules which could yield 7 drives.

 

1 eSata to 5x via port multiplier (SIL4726)

1 eSata to SAFE33 viaSiI5744

http://www.cooldrives.com/usb20espcbfo.html

 

However I've just come across these enclosures and the pricing seems right.

http://www.sansdigital.com/mobilestor/ms2utplus.html

http://www.sansdigital.com/mobilestor/ms2utplusb.html