What's the deal with controller cards?

[itsrumsey]

I was looking around on Amazon and Newegg for a SATA controller card to use with unRAID and found many in the $15-$50 range, then I came to the forums and checked the hardware forum and all suggestions are for $125-$250 cards.  Do I have to spend 1000% as much as I'd like in order to find a SATA controller card that is compatible with unRAID?  What's the deal here?  Can anyone recommended cheaper compatible options?

[itimpi]

I was looking around on Amazon and Newegg for a SATA controller card to use with unRAID and found many in the $15-$50 range, then I came to the forums and checked the hardware forum and all suggestions are for $125-$250 cards.  Do I have to spend 1000% as much as I'd like in order to find a SATA controller card that is compatible with unRAID?  What's the deal here?  Can anyone recommended cheaper compatible options?

The main trouble is that most of the cheap cards plug into an interface (e.g PCIe x 1) that cannot support sustained throughout from all attached drives, and the very cheap ones cannot even support the sustained throughput of a single modern SATA 3 capable drive.  Therefore using them with unRAID severely limits performance for things like parity syncing.  As soon as you start looking at cards that are PCIe x 4 (or even better PCIe x and support 3/6Gps throughput on the SATA connections then you will find that the price is significantly more.  If you go for the cheap options then you are in effect limiting yourself to attaching only 1 or 2 drives to a card so in practice they are almost certainly a false economy.

[itsrumsey]

The main trouble is that most of the cheap cards plug into an interface (e.g PCIe x 1) that cannot support sustained throughout from all attached drives, and the very cheap ones cannot even support the sustained throughput of a single modern SATA 3 capable drive.  Therefore using them with unRAID severely limits performance for things like parity syncing.  As soon as you start looking at cards that are PCIe x 4 (or even better PCIe x and support 3/6Gps throughput on the SATA connections then you will find that the price is significantly more.  If you go for the cheap options then you are in effect limiting yourself to attaching only 1 or 2 drives to a card so in practice they are almost certainly a false economy.

 

Very informational post, thank you.  Unfortunately my server's motherboard is limited to SATA 2 so using a cheaper card may not necessarily introduce further bottlenecks.  For this backup array, read/write performance is not paramount.  My primary concern is choosing a card that is supported, without some obscure controller chip that has no driver support.

 

This is the card I am currently considering: http://www.amazon.com/Syba-4-Port-HyperDuo-SD-PEX40054-Green/dp/B009LIPHNC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439075125&sr=8-1&keywords=sata+card+x4

Is Marvell 88SE9230 compatible?

[Frank1940]

The main trouble is that most of the cheap cards plug into an interface (e.g PCIe x 1) that cannot support sustained throughout from all attached drives, and the very cheap ones cannot even support the sustained throughput of a single modern SATA 3 capable drive.  Therefore using them with unRAID severely limits performance for things like parity syncing.  As soon as you start looking at cards that are PCIe x 4 (or even better PCIe x and support 3/6Gps throughput on the SATA connections then you will find that the price is significantly more.  If you go for the cheap options then you are in effect limiting yourself to attaching only 1 or 2 drives to a card so in practice they are almost certainly a false economy.

 

Very informational post, thank you.  Unfortunately my server's motherboard is limited to SATA 2 so using a cheaper card may not necessarily introduce further bottlenecks.  For this backup array, read/write performance is not paramount.  My primary concern is choosing a card that is supported, without some obscure controller chip that has no driver support.

 

This is the card I am currently considering: http://www.amazon.com/Syba-4-Port-HyperDuo-SD-PEX40054-Green/dp/B009LIPHNC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1439075125&sr=8-1&keywords=sata+card+x4

Is Marvell 88SE9230 compatible?

 

Try searching on this area:

 

  https://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?board=37.0

 

for 'Marvell 88SE9230'.  I believe a number of manufacturers are using this chipset. 

 

EDIT:    I see you linked to an Amazon.com product.  I have always had good luck in getting Amazon to pay for return shipping when something didn't work.  (As a point of disclosure, I am an Amazon prime member...)

[Viaduct]

Hi. I'm new to Unraid having just done first build.

I have a c2750d4i motherboard which has this SE9230 Marvell controller in it. I found it dropped discs under heavy load, in my case plex activity and simultaneous preclear of Drive. There's some stuff on it in a c2750/c2550 thread where there is apparently a Linux bug in the drivers. I have to admit that I haven't checked to see if a driver update is available, I just swapped to the Intel sata ports and all is now well.

So for the moment I am steering well clear of the Marvell one. Your mileage may vary. There is also a virtualisation problem with the Marvell chips so you may need to turn off IOMMU /virtualisation to make it work. Again I haven't tested this since I'm new to all this! This is in another thread here.

[itsrumsey]

Hi. I'm new to Unraid having just done first build.

I have a c2750d4i motherboard which has this SE9230 Marvell controller in it. I found it dropped discs under heavy load, in my case plex activity and simultaneous preclear of Drive. There's some stuff on it in a c2750/c2550 thread where there is apparently a Linux bug in the drivers. I have to admit that I haven't checked to see if a driver update is available, I just swapped to the Intel sata ports and all is now well.

So for the moment I am steering well clear of the Marvell one. Your mileage may vary. There is also a virtualisation problem with the Marvell chips so you may need to turn off IOMMU /virtualisation to make it work. Again I haven't tested this since I'm new to all this! This is in another thread here.

 

Thank you so much, after messing around with this thing unsuccessfully for 20 minutes I checked here again.  Disabling VT-d resolved the issue.

[spl147]

 

I was looking around on Amazon and Newegg for a SATA controller card to use with unRAID and found many in the $15-$50 range, then I came to the forums and checked the hardware forum and all suggestions are for $125-$250 cards.  Do I have to spend 1000% as much as I'd like in order to find a SATA controller card that is compatible with unRAID?  What's the deal here?  Can anyone recommended cheaper compatible options?

you can find LSI SAS9211-4i cards for $70 and LSI SAS9211-8i for $100 on ebay