I have an old P4 box lying around and I want to retrofit it into a makeshift storage server. It's a P4 1.6GHz with 512MB RAM, not good for much else. It doesn't have any SATA ports or gigabit Ethernet, so I will have to add those. I don't want to buy a nice RAID card or anything because it's PCI, and I really don't want to invest much money in a dead format.

 

My question; I want to add some cheap SATA cards to this box to get things rolling. Should I buy one cheap card like this? http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=19892&vpn=SY-SA3114-4R&manufacture=Syba (SIL 3114)

 

Or two cards like this? http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=33440&vpn=SD-SATA150R&manufacture=Syba (SIL 3112)

 

Cost is about the same and I was thinking of speed. They are both only SATA I, but they are going to be limited by the PCI bus I would assume. Do you think I would get better performance by using two cards?

my first unraid was using two cheap sata cards (2 sata + 1 ide - no raid) and they didn't do anything wrong to it.

It was slow (PCI) but beside that, all went good.

So i think you can go for it ('till you use a old PC).

a word of warning. some cards dont work well when you start adding a few of them on certain motherboards. I ahve a setup that would die randomly with 4 PCI Promise cards but would be OK with 2.

you can hardly go wrong with a card based in the SiliconImage chips... 3132?

 

a word of warning. some cards dont work well when you start adding a few of them on certain motherboards. I ahve a setup that would die randomly with 4 PCI Promise cards but would be OK with 2.

Older promise IDE controllers had this limitation. You could only put two on any given MB.  It was a Promise BIOS limit.

you can hardly go wrong with a card based in the SiliconImage chips... 3132?

 

Looks like that is a PCIe chip. I only have PCI at my disposal on this box, hence the original question of whether one or two cheap cards would give better performance.

 

There is also this guy http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=28106K (SiL 3124)

 

It claims to be SATA II, but is it worth the increase in price? Can PCI even deliver close to SATA II speeds?

 

1) One card or two

2) SATA or SATAII on PCI

3) Reliability? I don't expect the world from these cheap cards, but if anyone has any experience with them I would love to hear it.

 

Ideas?

If you are willing to pay 56.00 for a 4 port card. Then you might want to consider the Promise TX4 Sata300.

It can a support SATA300,

It has Native Command Queuing (NCQ), SATA Tagged Command Queuing (TCQ)

It's known to work.

If you happen to upgrade to a mother board that supports 32bit 66MHZ PCI bus, then you will see a speed increase.

I have an ITX motherboard that supports PCI 32Bit, 66Mhz(33mhz is the norm) and I do see a decent parity speed with 4 drives.

 

Maybe someone has a used one and they are looking to upgrade.

 

How many drives do you plan to max out in the current configuration?

 

 

Another choice is compgeeks special Silicon Image SATALink 4-Port SATA PCI Controller Card

http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=CL-SL3114&cpc=SCH

 

I was planning on getting this as a spare adapter just for the whole open motherboard experimenting thing.

In any case there were people reporting it worked, but others reporting freezes (but that was at least 2 revs ago).

you can hardly go wrong with a card based in the SiliconImage chips... 3132?

 

Looks like that is a PCIe chip. I only have PCI at my disposal on this box, hence the original question of whether one or two cheap cards would give better performance.

 

There is also this guy http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=28106K (SiL 3124)

 

It claims to be SATA II, but is it worth the increase in price? Can PCI even deliver close to SATA II speeds?

 

1) One card or two

2) SATA or SATAII on PCI

3) Reliability? I don't expect the world from these cheap cards, but if anyone has any experience with them I would love to hear it.

 

Ideas?

 

This card works well with unRAID and has 4 SATA I ports for $16.40 plus shipping:

 

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=2667&seq=1&format=2

I have one of these in my unRAID server.  It has 4 SATA-1 ports.  (I got it on sale for approx $25.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132013

 

I get roughly 75 MB/s read speeds and 65 MB/s write speeds (when pre-clearing a single disk, one that is not part of unRAID protected array, so no parity involved.)

 

Joe L.

 

I have one of these in my unRAID server.  It has 4 SATA-1 ports.  (I got it on sale for approx $25.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132013

 

I get roughly 75 MB/s read speeds and 65 MB/s write speeds (when pre-clearing a single disk, one that is not part of unRAID protected array, so no parity involved.)

 

Joe L.

 

That's a pretty decent card

 

External Ports  2 x eSATA 1.5G

Internal Connectors 4 x SATA 1.5G

Interface PCI 2.3, 32bit, 33/66Mhz

 

Keep in mind if you use two external ports, 2 internal ports will be disabled.

I like that it supports a 66Mhz bus too.