I have been running the 2 port card on my unraid server for a while now with no issue.  Is there something that I am missing by using these cheap cards vs. a supermicro AOC SAS card?  I just picked up another 2 port card, and thinking of also getting the 4 port card...

 

SYBA SY-PEX40039 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124045&cm_re=sata_card-_-16-124-045-_-Product

 

They also have a 4 port version for $16 AR

SYBA SI-PEX40064 PCI-Express 2.0 Low Profile Ready SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) Controller Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064&cm_re=sata_card-_-16-124-064-_-Product

 

flips

Those are decent prices... but its only 4 SATA pot per each PCIe slot. The AOC SAS give you 8. You can search eBay and find the AOC SAS used for pretty low prices. I have ordered 3, and I got a bum one, which I returned for a full refund. The other 2 are humming along nicely.

 

 

I just bought the 4 port card yesterday.  It was listed in the compatible hardware section of the wiki so it should be plug and play.  I looked around and I think this is the best deal right now if you need to add a few hard drives to your server.

I do not own any add-on SATA controllers but the only thing that might cause an issue is the Marvell chipset if you plan on messing with virtual machines. Marvell chipsets have caused issues in the past with dma errors (this may be resolved now but if you happen to see dma errors in your syslog then I would suspect the SATA controller). Not saying don't buy theses but I would just keep an eye out for the dma errors.

Thanks for the heads up! I had already ordered one of the 4 port cards on Amazon on Black Friday when it dropped to $22.99, but it hasn't shipped yet and they have no ETA.

 

Newegg had the same price, *plus* the rebate, so I jumped on it.

With the two 2port cards I have 6 on my mobo and then 4 on cards which maxes out my two 5 in 3 hot swap cases, so I think I am set.  I supposed if I got a cache drive that would justify the 4 port card.

 

The general rule is that you can put how many drives on a PCI-e slot before you are limited by the PCI bus?  4 drives?  From the wiki it says that PCI-e V2 is 500 MBytes/s.  SATA drives are about 120ish MBytes/s?  So 4x 120=480MBytes/s.  Does my math check out?

 

http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware_Compatibility#PCI_SATA_Controllers

 

flips

 

I tested various controllers and real world PCIe 2.0 1x bandwidth is a little over 400MB/s, four disks would be limited to ~105MB/s each, modern disks can do 200MB/s on outer cylinders and stay >150MB/s for the first 60% or so, for 4 ports I would recommend a PCIe 2.0 2x (or PCIe 1.0 4x) controller so it can handle 4 disks up to ~205MB/s, like the adaptec 1430SA or this one.

... The general rule is that you can put how many drives on a PCI-e slot before you are limited by the PCI bus?

 

The question isn't how many drives/slot => it's how many drives per LANE.    So if you're using an x2, x4, or x8 card you can clearly put a lot more drives on one of those cards than you can on a PCIe x1 card then on the 2 and 4 port cards noted in this thread.

 

You're correct that a v2 slot can handle 500MB/lane ... so an x1 card can easily manage two modern high-density drives; but a 4 port card would be bandwidth limited if more than 2 drives were active at once (e.g. during a parity check or drive rebuild).

 

So what card to get that has 4 sata ports for the x16 2.0 slot? I need another extra one for my cache drive. I got a Silicon Image SIL3132 and need to upgrade to 4 ports.

See 2 posts up, either one should work for you.

See 2 posts up, either one should work for you.

 

You posted this one:

SYBA SI-PEX40057 PCI-Express 2.0 x2 Low Profile SATA III (6.0Gb/s) 4-ports RAID Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124060 (at the moment they give you a free 2 port card with this one)

 

What is the difference?  is it the  2 lanes of bandwidth? on the top one?

 

SYBA SI-PEX40064 PCI-Express 2.0 Low Profile Ready SATA III (6.0 Gb/s) Controller Card

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

PEX40057 is PCIe 2x, PEX40064 is PCIe 1x, for normal read/writes to the array both will perform the same, for parity checks and using 4 disks they will max out at approximately 205MB/s and 105MB/s respectively.

Yes, that card is an x2 card, so it's got 2 lanes of bandwidth and is a v2 card, so that will provide 1GB/s of bandwidth ... plenty to support 4 drives with no bandwidth restrictions (as long as they're not SSDs).