Relatively cheap 16 drive card.

[TSM]

What does everyone think about this card? 

 

http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=1620

 

It's selling on Amazon right now for $199.99, but I've also see it $20 to $30 more on other sites. 

 

If you had 16 drives attached to this card, the PCI Express X4 would be a bottleneck with parity checks wouldn't it? 

[JorgeB]

I get limited to around 70/75 Mb/s with a SASLP PCIE 1.0 4x, if you don't have other bottlenecks it should be similar,  twice the bandwidth but twice the drives, if it works with unraid wich I don't know.

[SSD]

Look at the Areca cards. ARC-1260 / ARC-1261. I think the 1260 can be had for $99 on eBay.

[SSD]

ARC 1260 on eBay

[garycase]

... If you had 16 drives attached to this card, the PCI Express X4 would be a bottleneck with parity checks wouldn't it?

 

It's a PCIe v2.0 card, so you'd get 500MB/s/lane ... or 2000MB/s.    So yes, if you had 16 drives attached, this would be a bottleneck with modern drives during parity check or drive rebuilds while the drives were on the outer cylinders.  But in normal operation it's unlikely there'd be any throttling, as you're not likely to be using anywhere near all of the drives at once.

 

Note that the Areca card Brian suggested in a PCIe x8 card ... but it's not a v2.0 card, so the total bandwidth is the same [twice as many lanes, but half the bandwidth/lane]

 

Either card would work well, however, as long as you're not concerned about the minor impact it would have on parity checks and drive rebuilds.