From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Brad Campbell Subject: Re: I need a PCI V2.1 4 port SATA card Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 08:29:48 +0400 Message-ID: <44A205BC.90808@wasp.net.au> References: <200606280245.k5S2jkB24340@www.watkins-home.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <200606280245.k5S2jkB24340@www.watkins-home.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Guy Cc: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Guy wrote: > Hello group, > > I am upgrading my disks from old 18 Gig SCSI disks to 300 Gig SATA > disks. I need a good SATA controller. My system is old and has PCI V 2.1. > I need a 4 port card, or 2 2 port cards. My system has multi PCI buses, so > 2 cards may give me better performance, but I don't need it. I will be > using software RAID. Can anyone recommend a card that is supported by the > current kernel? I'm using Promise SATA150TX4 cards here in old PCI based systems. They work great and have been rock solid for well in excess of a year 24/7 hard use. I have 3 in one box and 4 in another. I'm actually looking at building another 15 disk server now and was hoping to move to something quicker using _almost_ commodity hardware. My current 15 drive RAID-6 server is built around a KT600 board with an AMD Sempron processor and 4 SATA150TX4 cards. It does the job but it's not the fastest thing around (takes about 10 hours to do a check of the array or about 15 to do a rebuild). I'd love to do something similar with PCI-E or PCI-X and make it go faster (the PCI bus bandwidth is the killer), however I've not seen many affordable PCI-E multi-port cards that are supported yet and PCI-X seems to mean moving to "server" class mainboards and the other expenses that come along with that. Brad -- "Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams