January 1, 201115 yr My main board only has 6 onboard SATA connections. I'm going to end up with a 9 bay case. I'll eventually maybe add more than 6 drives. I have a couple of questions regarding the PCI-E SATA cards. Which are of a good quality and fast? Are they slower than the onboard connections? And which drives do you hook up the onboard connections and/or the PCI-E card? I'm struggling to find the "sweet" setup for this. Thanks!
January 1, 201115 yr Heard good things about this card; http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-SASLP-MV8.cfm no answer for the rest of your questions, I'm curious myself.
January 1, 201115 yr It depends on how many ports you need and how much you want to pay. They above Supermicro card is the go-to card around here. Add 8 SATA drives but will cost you for both the card and the break-out cables you'll need. That may be over kill. I just purchased a much cheaper 2 port SATA PCIE card from monoprice for like $15 which has been recommended. Definitely go PCIE if you can, and get as many ports as you need or can afford. Searching the hardware forum and using Raj's example builds is a terrific way to find options. I believe the general philosophy is to put your parity drive off the MB for speed/bandwidth reasons. I would probably fill the MB slots up first and then add on as needed. It really should only make a big difference in parity building/checking if I recall.
January 2, 201115 yr Author Thanks. Since the SATA card is a very important piece of the system I'll most likely buy a very good one. Makes sense. I'm looking forward to getting up at least a three drive config to test out some speeds and such. That Supermicro card is only $100. That's not too bad considering how important it is. I heard RocketRaid cards are good. Anyone use any of them here, and do they perform better than this SuperMicro card? I basically want to buy the best SATA card I can. Well, I appreciate all your answers...and I've just tapped the top of reading ALL the information that is out there. Eventually I'll have to buy a 10 bay case, which will be a fun thing to do.
January 13, 201115 yr In my opinion the SASLP card is the best on the market today. Sure there are more expensive ones, but they don't gain you anything in the unRAID environment. I also like the 2 port PCIe x1 SIL3132 cards sold at monoprice for under $20 if you only need to get a few more ports.
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