November 15, 201411 yr I just bought a SYBA SD-PEX40049 card specifically for preclearing. It's a 2 port PCI-E 2.0 x1 SATA III card where each port can be either be internal or external. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124051 http://www.amazon.com/Syba-6Gbps-Switch-eSATA-SD-PEX40049/dp/B006SF68OS/ I was using this card solely for pre-clearing drives, but time came to use it with a drive in the array. The drive I put on it would redball on spinup (I only used one port on the card). This happened several times. I tried a different Seagate 3TB drive to rule out drive issues. I replaced it with an IBM m1115 and the redball issues disappeared and both Seagates have been fine since. I've never had any redball issues with my server before. I don't recommend using this card in an unRAID array.
November 15, 201411 yr SYBA SD-PEX40049 -> "Based on ASMedia ASM1061 PCI-Express 2.0 SATA 6Gbps Controller" I have the Startech model that is similar. It works for me with ESX and unRAID 5 The linux PMP driver for it, isn't all that smooth, yet for a single drive it works well. On my SSD I achieved a dd benchmark of over 450MB/s on a HP GEN7 Microserver in a GEN2 slot. A GEN2 slot is capable of 500MB/s full duplex, so that's actually a pretty decent speed.
November 16, 201411 yr Author Yes the speed for preclearing was great and I never had any problems using it for preclears, but it caused too many problems for me in the array. Perhaps if the drives are not spun down it would be fine.
November 16, 201411 yr Yes the speed for preclearing was great and I never had any problems using it for preclears, but it caused too many problems for me in the array. Perhaps if the drives are not spun down it would be fine. Might be a driver timing issue. Years back Tom had to modify something to expand a timer as many people were having difficulty coming from a spin down to spin up state reliably. I mentioned the startech card because it's based on the same chipset. At least people will be forewarned of the chipset driver and it's potential issues.
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.