4 Port PCI-E 1x Sata Cards?

[worldgate]

Does a 4 port pci-e 1x card exist that can handle 3TB/4TB drives?  I'm not raiding them together, all JBOD.  I ask because I've been trying to find 4 port cards for my two pci-e 1x ports and a card that can do 4-8 for my normal PCI slot.  I have a Raidmax Seiran case, thats white, that I have been trying to fit potentially 15 drives into.  The motherboard i have is salvaged from an old gateway machine, it has 5 SATA ports and 1 SATA/ESATA port.  So i either need to get 2x2 port PCI-E cards and find a 8 port PCI card.  Havent been able to find any, except one that has 4 ports but two are PATA which is confusing since PATA doesnt come in a SATA form factor.

 

Any help would be great.

[WeeboTech]

I would seriously reconsider getting older or specialty SATA cards and go with a modern motherboard.

 

In the long run you will have better features and performance.

 

When getting into the 3TB/4TB drive range, an adminstrator needs to think about speed for parity checks.

 

8 ports on a PCI bus will work fine for simple reads, but when doing full server parity operations (check/generate) it's going to be a bottleneck.

 

In addition, by the time 2x4 port PCIe cards and an 8 port PCI card are sourced, you could invest into a nice motherboard and an 8 port PCIe card or go with a couple 4 port PCIe cards.

 

Supermicro has an 8 port PCI-X card that can work in a PCI slot as long as the pins do not touch anything else on the motherboard. Perhaps tape them. 

 

However I would still suggest a motherboard upgrade if large drives are going to be used.

[garycase]

Does a 4 port pci-e 1x card exist that can handle 3TB/4TB drives?

 

Yes, this card works with drives > 2TB, so you can use 3TB, 4TB, 5TB, etc.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064

 

 

I've been trying to find 4 port cards for my two pci-e 1x ports and a card that can do 4-8 for my normal PCI slot.

 

Note that the bandwidth on a PCI slot is LOWER than on a PCIe x1 slot.  You do NOT want to put 8 drives on a PCI slot => although that's not an issue, as you won't find more than a 4-port card 

In fact, I wouldn't put more than 2 drives on a PCI slot controller.

 

 

I completely agree with WeeboTech that you should really abandon your goal here and buy a modern motherboard with multiple PCIe x4 (or above) slots, so you can add a good controller with sufficient bandwidth.

 

If, however, you don't care about parity check speeds, you COULD build a 15-drive system with the board you have using (a) the 5 motherboard ports;  (b) two of the 4-port PCIe x1 cards I listed above; and © a 2-port PCI card.    This would work fine -- at full speed for most reads and writes (except those on the PCI slot controller) -- but would be very slow when doing parity checks, the initial parity sync, and any drive rebuilds.

 

[worldgate]

However I would still suggest a motherboard upgrade if large drives are going to be used.

 

The problem is that all of the 'server' motherboards are eATX and the cases I can use, at this time, are ATX.  Is there any motherboards that are ATX compliant, ie fit into an ATX case, that would be able to support better cards?  I do have an LSI card that is 8 port thats eATX and i taped off the last part of it so that it wouldnt touch anything.  Only case, with 9 bays down the front, I could find was the Raidmax Seiran.

 

Assuming I don't use the raid, the PCI-E card the other person pointed to should be fine for reading and writing to the drives until I have the capacity to have a rack type setup?

 

NOTE: Forgot to mention the PCI-X card only supports 2TB drives.

[garycase]

SuperMicro makes several nice ATX (and even uATX boards) that work very nicely with UnRAID.

 

For example, for the latest Socket 1150 Haswell CPU's:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1150

 

[worldgate]

SuperMicro makes several nice ATX (and even uATX boards) that work very nicely with UnRAID.

 

For example, for the latest Socket 1150 Haswell CPU's:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon3000/#1150

 

Wow some of them have a massive amount of SATA connectors making a card almost pointless.  You know of any similarly good/decent previous generation boards?  I'm not doing enterprise here, im just setting up a place to put dumps of my movies from bluray/dvd/hddvd and a few laserdiscs.  (Yea i know, laserdiscs are old, but so is vinyl.)

[garycase]

You know of any similarly good/decent previous generation boards?

 

Just scroll down the page I gave you the link to above => pick your socket and you'll see the list of boards.  The Socket 1155 boards are for the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPU's

 

 

... just setting up a place to put dumps of my movies from bluray/dvd/hddvd and a few laserdiscs.  (Yea i know, laserdiscs are old, but so is vinyl.)

 

Definitely understand.    I ripped over 800 vinyls over the past decade or so (just got rid of them last year after I finished all the rips and scanning all the jackets).    I've also got a few VHS tapes that I recorded to digital media 

[worldgate]

The laserdiscs I have are movies like stand up comedy, george carlin, etc.  For about a year or so i went on a laserdisc collecting spree, didn't realize that they would be so heavy to move, but they look nice on the shelf stacked there.  Most everyone confuses them with vinyl, to which i tell them, 'well your close enough'.

 

So would a PCI-X motherboard be worse than having the 4x pci-e slots if i was going to eventually have an unraid server?  Alot of these boards seem to have a lot of pci-x slots, and a good majority of sata cards seem to be pci-x.

[garycase]

A 64-bit PCI-X slot has plenty of bandwidth for 4 or even (if it's the latest version) 8 SATA ports.  It's "better" than a PCIe x2 slot, but slightly slower than a PCIe x4 slot.

 

If you have some PCI-X cards they're fine to use ... FAR better than using a PCI slot. (at least 8 times the bandwidth).    But given a choice (i.e. you're buying new cards) I'd go with PCIe x4 or higher.  There are some excellent motherboards with 3 or more PCIe x4 slots ... e.g. the X9SCM-iiF has 4 PCIe x8 slots (2 of them operate at x4).

 

[worldgate]

I think its going to take some time to come up with the money to afford one of these server boards.  The more i look at them the more im convinced they are a better way to do things than repurposing an old desktop.  I suppose for now i can get some of those pci-e 1x cards just for handling the drives.  How much processing power would this unraid need?  I suppose i would need at least DD2/3 or better for faster processing?

[garycase]

If you're just going to use UnRAID for its basic purpose -- as a fault-tolerant NAS -- any CPU will be fine.  Not sure what you're asking about r.e. "... at least DD2/3 ..") => if you're referring to the memory you need (DDR, DDR2, DDR3), that is determined by what the motherboard uses ... you can't change it.

 

[worldgate]

If you're just going to use UnRAID for its basic purpose -- as a fault-tolerant NAS -- any CPU will be fine.  Not sure what you're asking about r.e. "... at least DD2/3 ..") => if you're referring to the memory you need (DDR, DDR2, DDR3), that is determined by what the motherboard uses ... you can't change it.

 

I was just wondering if the cpu/memory type mattered as much for parity like the speed of the pci slot does?  I don't want to buy another motherboard and processor down the road because it takes 400 hours to rebuild a drive if one should fail.

[WeeboTech]

If you're just going to use UnRAID for its basic purpose -- as a fault-tolerant NAS -- any CPU will be fine.  Not sure what you're asking about r.e. "... at least DD2/3 ..") => if you're referring to the memory you need (DDR, DDR2, DDR3), that is determined by what the motherboard uses ... you can't change it.

 

I was just wondering if the cpu/memory type mattered as much for parity like the speed of the pci slot does?  I don't want to buy another motherboard and processor down the road because it takes 400 hours to rebuild a drive if one should fail.

 

 

CPU does not matter that much. Even an ATOM is capable of handling the parity checks/generate at a reasonable speed.

Memory matters if you want to have frequent data buffered.  512MB being the minimum, 2GB for a budget conscious build, 4GB being a current high level. You can go higher, but the return on investment gets smaller.    The amount of ram 'can' aid parity build/check speeds if you bump up the unRAID tunables.

 

What really matters most is the choice of slots, controllers and layout (internal build) of the board.