Anyone using this card?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124032

 

For that matter, how happy are people with Syba cards in general?  I've always tended to avoid them, because they seemed like a bargain basement brand to me.  It's hard for me to ignore 5 ports in one card for that price though. 

Anyone using this card?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124032

 

For that matter, how happy are people with Syba cards in general?  I've always tended to avoid them, because they seemed like a bargain basement brand to me.  It's hard for me to ignore 5 ports in one card for that price though. 

 

It not so much the maker of the card that matter, but it does count for something.  It is more of the chipset they use, which in this case is SIL based... at least the SY-PEX4008 is SIL based and I would assume the same for the one you linked above.

 

Now, with all that said, you will be saturating the x1 connection by putting that many drives on there.  A x1 connection does not truly have the bandwidth to fully supply at max speed that many drives.  But all of this will only com into effect when you are running parity checks, heavily using the system, or trying to get at a lot of data from multiple drives that are on that same controller card.  If it were up to me I would go with the one I linked above that has 4 ports on it.

Now, with all that said, you will be saturating the x1 connection by putting that many drives on there.  A x1 connection does not truly have the bandwidth to fully supply at max speed that many drives.  But all of this will only com into effect when you are running parity checks, heavily using the system, or trying to get at a lot of data from multiple drives that are on that same controller card.  If it were up to me I would go with the one I linked above that has 4 ports on it.

 

I would not worry so much with 4 drives on a PCIe x1 slot.

PCIe x1 It is rated around 250Mb/s in comparison to PCI at 133Mb/s.

With PCI there is an IRQ involved and a wait state.

The PCIe is also full duplex. Meaning a drive can be written and another read from at the same time so effectively it can be using 500Mb/s.

 

Considering that many people use the Promise TX4 with decent results, I'm sure you can get away with the x1 by 4 port card or even the X1 by 5 port card.

 

The major issue here is compatibility. from what I can remember, someone tried a 4 port board and it did not work.

There was someone who tried a 5 port card and found it uses two JMICRON Controller chips.

I believe it worked, but it was also not the speediest of cards heh.

 

I would be interested in results with this 5 port card. Seems like a nice way to expand ports for a decent price.

Now, with all that said, you will be saturating the x1 connection by putting that many drives on there.  A x1 connection does not truly have the bandwidth to fully supply at max speed that many drives.  But all of this will only com into effect when you are running parity checks, heavily using the system, or trying to get at a lot of data from multiple drives that are on that same controller card.  If it were up to me I would go with the one I linked above that has 4 ports on it.

 

I would not worry so much with 4 drives on a PCIe x1 slot.

PCIe x1 It is rated around 250Mb/s in comparison to PCI at 133Mb/s.

With PCI there is an IRQ involved and a wait state.

The PCIe is also full duplex. Meaning a drive can be written and another read from at the same time so effectively it can be using 500Mb/s.

 

Considering that many people use the Promise TX4 with decent results, I'm sure you can get away with the x1 by 4 port card or even the X1 by 5 port card.

 

The major issue here is compatibility. from what I can remember, someone tried a 4 port board and it did not work.

There was someone who tried a 5 port card and found it uses two JMICRON Controller chips.

I believe it worked, but it was also not the speediest of cards heh.

 

I would be interested in results with this 5 port card. Seems like a nice way to expand ports for a decent price.

 

Fair enough and good to know.  When (which will be a while) I need to expand my storage I will probably grab the 4 or 5 port version of this card.  From the reading I have been doing these ARE the RAID version of the card BUT they can be flashed with the non RAID BIOS so that they can be used purely as a SATA controller card.  I think if that is done then it may be possible to get this working in unRAID.

From the reading I have been doing these ARE the RAID version of the card BUT they can be flashed with the non RAID BIOS so that they can be used purely as a SATA controller card.  I think if that is done then it may be possible to get this working in unRAID.

 

Do s'more research.  This 5 port card seems to be 6 ports, 5 internal, 1 external.  It may be a SIL3132 married to a 5 port, port multiplier. In that case it may very well work.

Do some searches around the board, the other 5 port card (I think it was a lian-li card) Used the jmicron chipset with some form of IDE to SATA bridging.

From the reading I have been doing these ARE the RAID version of the card BUT they can be flashed with the non RAID BIOS so that they can be used purely as a SATA controller card.  I think if that is done then it may be possible to get this working in unRAID.

 

Do s'more research.  This 5 port card seems to be 6 ports, 5 internal, 1 external.  It may be a SIL3132 married to a 5 port, port multiplier. In that case it may very well work.

Do some searches around the board, the other 5 port card (I think it was a lian-li card) Used the jmicron chipset with some form of IDE to SATA bridging.

 

Yup yup, I found those other threads also.

 

I do realize that the one card has 6 ports total, but I tend to ignore them as I don't feel like dealing with "external" connectors.  I usually only count the number of ports that are internal.