Re: [Slightly OT] Cheap 4-port PCI-E SATA card?

[John Robinson <john.robinson@anonymous.org.uk>]

On 02/01/2011 23:04, Matt Garman wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 3:11 PM, John Robinson
> <john.robinson@anonymous.org.uk>  wrote:
>> Please could someone suggest a cheap PCI-E SATA card with 4 internal ports?
>>
>> I currently have 6 motherboard SATA ports and a 5-drive hot-swap chassis, I
>> am thinking of adding a second 5-drive hot-swap chassis to my case and would
>> need another 4 SATA ports to drive it.
>>
>> Other requirements: known to work with RHEL/CentOS 5 kernels, even if it
>> means installing a driver with DKMS or whatever.
>
> You can also get a SAS card, and an overpriced mini-SAS to SATA cable.
>   The LSI SAS 1068e chip is quite common and well supported by Linux.
> You can buy LSI-branded cards, or from another OEM that uses the same
> chip.  Intel makes such a card, and I just read that IBM does as well,
> the ServeRAID BR10i LSI SAS3082E-R.  Covered in detail here:
>
>      http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-br10i-lsi-sas3082e-r-pciexpress-sas-raid-controller/
>
> Such a card will actually give you a total of eight SATA ports, but
> you obviously don't have to use them all; you can get away with only
> buying one of the SAS to 4-SATA port fanout cables.
>
> I grabbed two of those IBM BR10i cards off of ebay for about $50.
> Unfortunately, I didn't pay close attention to the listing, and mine
> came without PCI brackets.  But so far I've tested one, and it works
> just fine.

I've just had a look on eBay and the few there are don't have brackets 
in their pictures. But still, this is definitely an option, looks like I 
might be able to pick one up for about £50, which was pretty much the 
most I really wanted to spend. More like £60 by the time I've got the 
cable, but I would have another 4 spare SATA ports :-)

>> Doesn't have to be PCI-E x1 because I've a spare x8 (logical)/x16 (physical)
>> slot, but I don't know if anything cheap's going to be anything other than
>> PCI-E x1. v2.0 (5GT/s) would be nice though.
>
> If you're using a typical consumer-grade motherboard, watch out that
> the PCIe slot supports things other than video cards.  For whatever
> reason, particularly on micro-ATX boards, the PCIe x8/x16 slots often
> won't work with anything other than video cards.  Trying to use
> something else (e.g. a RAID card) will, at best, prohibit the machine
> from booting, or at worst, cause very subtle random problems.

It's an Asus P5Q Pro, Intel P45+ICH10R, a fairly boring basic 
workstation grade (not gaming) full ATX motherboard, and if it doesn't 
like having something other than a video card in its second x16 slot 
I'll start screaming at Asus.

Thanks for your advice!

Cheers,

John.
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