I now need to buy a PCI SATA board for my unraid server.

Which one is the best to use. I need 6 SATA ports on the new board.

 

I will be using the new SATA card for blu ray movie storage so it needs to be able to keep up with streaming them.

 

Thx

Check out the Hardware Compatibility Page for SATA boards that are known to work.  If you require a PCI board and not a PCI-e board it is going to be harder to find one that has 6 ports on it... not to mention if you do fill that board up you will be saturating the PCI bus and performance (especially parity checks) will be effected severely.

A few of us use the SUPERMICRO AOC-SAT2-MV8 64-bit PCI-X133MHz SATA Controller Card. It works well in a regular PCI slot & will give you 8 SATA 3.0gig ports. I am currently using a couple of these in 2 different unRAID servers. Haven't had any problems with them.. I'll post a link below pointing to the card..

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815121009

 

Hope this helps..

 

P.S. Parity check speeds will be effected. Performance on the other hand will be fine. The card can keep up with any single drive out there for read speeds. Make sure you have your parity drive on the mother board.

I have been looking at this one. It only gives me 4 more SATA ports but that will do.

 

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132018&Tpk=N82E16816132018

 

It looks like it will work just fine. I have the GIGABYTE GA-MA74GM-S2 motherboard.

Blade,

 

I recently inquired about the same as I have also run out of onboard sata ports. I am hoping the next beta will have the updated kernel so I can pick up a PCI-e Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8 port sata card. I may venture out and roll my own kernel but for now I'll try to wait it out.

 

http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SASLP-MV8.cfm

 

This is not an option now but I'm hopeful.

 

------------------

 

Current known working options are slim on the PCIe front. The card you already pointed out. If you look under Deals it has been mentioned recently. Easy enough to search site for RC-218 and find where it has been used. 

 

On MonoPrice is a Silicon Image SIL3132 PCIe card but its only 2 ports. Advantage of that card is cost, it will use a 1X pcie slot (depends on your view) and if I'm not mistake I can use a Port Multiplier with the card allowing more than 2 drives to be connected. Same here search for SIL3132.

 

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=104&cp_id=10407&cs_id=1040702&p_id=2530&seq=1&format=2

 

You motherboard only has 2 PCIe slots one 16x and one 1x so your in the same boat as I. If you get the Rosewill you will have to use it in the 16x slot as its a 4x card.

 

 

I should also mention another untested option..

I found a PCI-E SATA II 4x Ports RAID Controller Card, SIL3124 on ebay. Its a 1x card with 4 sata ports. Cost is same as the Rosewill. I may just pick this up and give it go.

 

Specification

    * Sil3124 chipset with PCI-Express Interface

    * Compliant with PCI Express Specification Revision 1.0a

    * 1-Lane (x1) PCI Express with transfer rate 2.5 Gb/s Full Duplex channel

    * Fully Plug & Play compatible

    * Supports Raid function 0, 1, 5, 10

    * SATA II Interface

    * Integrated Serial ATA Link and PHY logic

    * Compliant with Serial ATA 1.0 and Serial ATA II Extensions to Serial ATA 1.0 Specifications

    * Supports Serial ATA Generation 2 transfer rate of 3.0 Gb/s

    * Supports Serial ATA II: Port Multiplier 1.0 Specifications

    * Backward compatible to SATA 1.0 Specification

    * Supports four independent Serial ATA channels

    * Independent Link, Transport, and data FIFO

    * Independent command fetch, scatter/gather, and command execution

    * Supports Legacy Command Queuing (LCQ)

    * Supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ)

    * Supports Non-zero offsets (NCQ)

    * Supports out of order data delivery NCQ

    * Supports FIS-based switching with Port Multipliers

    * Driver supported MS Windows 2000/XP/Vista, Linux, Mac OS 10.4x, Red Hat Linux 8.0.9.0, SuSE Linux 8.1, 8.2,United Linux 1.0

     

System Requirement

    * Hardware: Computer with PCI-Express slot

     

Include

    * 4 channels PCI-Express Serial ATA II host controller card

    * 2x SATA cables

    * CD driver

    * User manual

 

Cheers, db

Interesting find boone.  Definitely worthy of exploration haha.  I forwarded it to one of my buddies who is also looking to add more connections to his rig also (supermicro X7SLA-H-O based).  I noticed in the hardware compatibility page that SIL3124's are supported but they have previously all been onboard based...

The SIL3124 on ebay reminds me of the SY-PEX40008 Syba

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027

 

Just no one no real success mentioned in the forum. 

 

If you do find any additional info please share here.

 

Thanks db

It sounds like people have had luck with the SiL 3124 chipset used on the SYBA SY-PEX40008.  It would be really nice to get solid confirmation of this so we have a tested 4 port SATA II PCIe 1x solution.

 

Right now we have three threads that all question if it worked and it looks like they're not the latest betas.  Some of the current betas seem to be using this card or one very like it.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027&cm_re=SiL3124-_-16-124-027-_-Product

 

If you've bought it and used it with unRaid, please let us know for sure as we have lots of "it doesn't work" but nothing specific to this model of card.  (We do have recommendations that the 3124 works on motherboards, it would be nice to confirm it on addon cards.