I need to expand my array. right now my motherboard can have 10 sata drives. i have a pci card but what i am looking for is a pci-e card (or cards) that can give me no less than 8 more ports, but better 10. i dont care if it has raid capabilities or not, or even if i have to buy two cards. im just having trouble finding something cost effective. i need low cost but not cheap. i just a need a quality, cost effective way to add 10 more ports. i did some research and see a bunch of people talking about waiting for some LSI chip to be released but havent really found what i need. any ideas?

Here is PCIe x8 card that should work (LSI 1068E):

http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid-controllers/SASUC8I/SASUC8I-overview.htm

 

I need to expand my array. right now my motherboard can have 10 sata drives. i have a pci card but what i am looking for is a pci-e card (or cards) that can give me no less than 8 more ports, but better 10. i dont care if it has raid capabilities or not, or even if i have to buy two cards. im just having trouble finding something cost effective. i need low cost but not cheap. i just a need a quality, cost effective way to add 10 more ports. i did some research and see a bunch of people talking about waiting for some LSI chip to be released but havent really found what i need. any ideas?

 

I would not recommend RAID cards that don't support true JBOD. Or you won't be able to move disks around if the card fails.

Due to metadata that most of the RAID cards write to the disks in JBOD mode the disks are not "portable" so you will have to use exact same card to read your data.

Looks for the ones that are LSI 1064E or 1068E based. They are relatively inexpensive and support true JBOD (no volumes have to be created in the RAID bios and no metadata is written to the drives).

I bought this one for my Opensolaris box and the card works great:http://cgi.ebay.ca/LSI-SAS3041E-HP-4-Port-PCI-E-SAS-SATA-RAID-Controller_W0QQitemZ140368551258QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item20ae9e1d5a

Though it is only 4 ports and, unfortunately, I can't test it on unRAID since the mobo I have there has no PCIe slots. Theoretically it is Fusion MPT, so should work with unRAID.

Also keep in mind that all those "not cheap" cards are at least PCIe x4.

 

Another one (4-port), but low profile bracket and requires cable (link to cables in the description):

http://cgi.ebay.ca/HP-LSI-SAS3042EL-SAS-SATA-Raid-Controller-447430-001_W0QQitemZ330386762532QQcmdZViewItemQQptZCOMP_EN_Networking_Components?hash=item4cec95eb24

 

It depends on how soon you need the extra 8 drives. I bought an x8 LSI SAS3081E-R off ebay at the begining of the year hoping to test it with the 4.5 beta series.  Long story short it works now with an updated version of unraid Tom sent me.  It needs to be tweaked a little bit more (no hard drive temps or smart reporting) but I tested it and am running 6 disks on the card with a parity check rate of about 50MB/S.

 

The card will work in an x16 slot too

 

If you don't want a card that isn't fully supported yet then you need to watch out for all SAS/SATA cards as a lot use the MPT drive and that's what is being worked on by Tom right now.

 

 

Check my thread out http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3109.0

 

 

Here's one on ebay for 194.99 http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-LSI-Logic-SAS3081E-R-SAS-RAID-Controller-LSI00182_W0QQitemZ350291130734QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCC_Drives_Storage_Internal?hash=item518efa796e

For right now, PCI-e is limited to four additional sata ports, a Marvell based 7042 chipset board like the adaptec 1430SA. There are other four port cards but the adaptec 1430sa or rosewill (218 I think) are the tried and tested options.

 

LSI/Supermicro/Adaptec and others arent currently supported in shipping software. As for the high density sata/sas raid boards, 3ware is probably the best bet since they support true "single disk" operation but their cards are expensive. The supermicro PCI-e board is the cheapest but not yet supported.   

 

The other option would be a SIL3132 and a couple of port multipliers.   

The LSI SAS3081E-R supports single disk operations you just have to flash the firmware to Initiator-Target from Integrated RAID.  The only down side right now is the support isn't 100% but it's close.  I've been testing and using my card for a about a week now and it works great.  I've put all the drives on the card, split the drives up and even took a drive out of the array to simulate a failure and it worked as advertised.

 

Give Tom a month or so and I think he'll have the 100% for the SAS/SATA cards.  I also like the card because it is an x8 card so each drive will gets it's own channel.

Anyone know which LSI non-Raid SAS cards will be supported by Tom in the near future? Thanks much!

Anyone know which LSI non-Raid SAS cards will be supported by Tom in the near future? Thanks much!

 

Whatever is supported by mptsas (which is already in unRAID kernel).

This covers 1064E and 1068E based cards discussed in this thread.

the other thing is some of these cards are say for instance, 4x with 4 ports and say 3gbps. but each lane for pcie is 500MBps. so that would be 2GBps total. wouldnt that be a theoretical bottleneck?

Each lane of PCI-e 1.0 is 250MB/s each way. PCI-e 2.0 is using DDR techniques for 500MB/s. Even a fast HDD will struggle to maintain 125MB/s. Sata 3 gbps or 6 gbps is based on a 10 bit byte encoding of the 8 bit data so 3 gbps becomes 300MB/s becomes 240MB/s. The 8/10b encoding of PCI-e is already accounted for in the 250MB/s per channel. 

 

A Gb nic will theoretically manage 125MB/s, in reality 65-75MB/s is much more common. So the network is by far the biggest bottleneck.

 

x4 or x8 card will give you some very nice parity check speeds though.

Good GigE Intel NICs can achieve about 95MB/s.

So the network is by far the biggest bottleneck.

This might be true when READING data from disks, as when "checking" parity (since only reads are being performed), but when writing files to the parity protected array the biggest bottleneck is the rotational speed of the disks involved. 

 

You can have everything else at gigabyte speed on the LAN, and on BUS to the disk controllers, but you will still be limited to how fast the disks involved can spin.  (and since there are two disks involved, you are limited by the rotation speed of the slower of the two.  A 5400 RPM drive will be a third slower than a 7200 RPM drive. )

 

See here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4844.msg45253#msg45253

 

Joe L.

A 5400 RPM drive will be a third slower than a 7200 RPM drive. )

Joe L.

 

LOL, I've learned that the hard way, my 7200RPM 2Tb hitachi drive took about 18 hours on the preclear.... my Seagate 5900RPM 2tb took about 26 hours.... my 1.5 took TOO much time since I began the array, and established parity and began copying so the preclear on that ended up taking 36 hours! 

A 5400 RPM drive will be a third slower than a 7200 RPM drive. )

Joe L.

 

LOL, I've learned that the hard way, my 7200RPM 2Tb hitachi drive took about 18 hours on the preclear.... my Seagate 5900RPM 2tb took about 26 hours.... my 1.5 took TOO much time since I began the array, and established parity and began copying so the preclear on that ended up taking 36 hours! 

 

My 2TB Hitachi took about 26 hours to complete, that was with a few other things running which may have slowed the processes down a little bit.