Hello All,

 

I am trying to locate a decent PCI-E 1x SATA controller.  I got a Syba SY-PEX40013 and the first 2 channels are great, but the second 2 are sub-par.  Unusable for the size of drives I use, 1.5TB, as it takes about 20 minutes to get 1% on clearing the drives.  Average bandwidth is around 6MB/s compared to rest of the drives running at 60ish MB/s.

 

So after looking in the forums, hardware list, and Newegg, I found this one, Lian Li IB-01.  I seen there was a thread where it was very closely looked at and there was some excitement, but no one ever bought one forms the looks of it.  Has anyone bought one?

 

If there is another one that I missed I am all ears as well.  I am pretty much stuck with PCI-E 1x though since I have a Gigabyte GA-EP43-UD3L and I am using one of the PCI slots for video and since it is a Gigabyte board, I doubt the PCI-E 16x slot will work with anything except a video card.  So that leaves me with 4x PCI-E 1x and 1x PCI slot to work with.

 

Thanks!

-Sheldon

Did you try putting the PCIe card in the x16 slot?

 

As far as the Lian Li 5 port card. I think you will have somewhat acceptable performance, but not great.

I believe it is a JMB 363 with an embedded port multiplier. You should get decent performance with a single drive access at a time. Parity generate/calculate may suffer a bit, but "should" be acceptable.

There is a performance penalty when using port multipliers, but a good one will have acceptable performance.

You may even be able to increase performance by staggering or setting the drives in a round robin so you are not accessing each drive in succession on the same controller.

 

Now if speed is what you are after you can use the 2 port Sil3132's with good results.

4 @ $20 each will provide 8 ports, each with enough bandwidth for every drive at top speed.

 

There has also been a post about someone who modified his x1 slot and popped in an adaptec 1430sa.

He said it worked and did not notice a performance degradation.

highpoint rocketraid 2300 is natic 1x 4 port.

Highpoint 2300 uses same chipset as Adaptec 1430sa, works great (I get a info message about data corruption but filled a drive and saw no corruption, drives are not managed by the card, no raid array created). Trouble is finding one. Cost wise 4 x SIL3132 would be similar to a 4 port Highpoint 2300. I picked mine up from ebay. 

 

You could put a couple of drives on each of the PCI-e slots and a couple on the other PCI slot and still get good parity check performance and another ten drives. SIL3132 are really cheap, you have plenty of slots, just add two ports at a time as needed.

 

I found using three ports on the SY-PEX40013 worked reasonably well. In fact if you can get em cheap I'd say they make a good alternative to a SIL3132 with the possibility to add a third drive if needed. I wouldnt run one with four drives though!

 

I wouldnt give up on the X16 slot just yet either. I've seen that different cards work differently in different x16 slots. It could be that an areca, 3ware or  LSI card will work in the future, even if a supermicro doesn't. Perhaps you have an unraider nearby who might lend you some kit to try?

 

 

 

 

Thank you for the responses.  I am looking in to several different cards at the moment and I got a chance to test the SATA card in the 16x slot.  The 16x slot works well with my SATA card works like a champ so I can fill all 15 drive bays pretty easy now!

 

On a side note, I have a buddy that is going to let me have his 3ware 9650SE-4LPML PCI-E card since he is going to use it.  Will be interesting to see if it works or not.

 

Again thank you for the responses and I can't wait to get atleast 10 drives in my box and to start on my second unRaid.  ;-)

On a side note, I have a buddy that is going to let me have his 3ware 9650SE-4LPML PCI-E card since he is going to use it.  Will be interesting to see if it works or not.

 

My test this weekend with a 9550sx revealed it works. Somewhere along the line the 3ware driver was put into the unRAID kernel.  I was able to access a drive JBOD and as a RAID0 array.

 

My 3ware with cache and RAID0 on Parity gave some stellar numbers in performance.