From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Petr Vyskocil Subject: Re: I need a PCI V2.1 4 port SATA card Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 14:12:06 +0200 Message-ID: References: <200606280245.k5S2jkB24340@www.watkins-home.com> <44A205BC.90808@wasp.net.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <44A205BC.90808@wasp.net.au> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Brad Campbell wrote: > 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. Recently I was looking for a budget solution to exactly this problem, and the best I found was to use 2-port SiI 3132 based PCI-E 1x card combined with 1:5 SATA Splitter based on SiI 3726 (e.g. http://fwdepot.com/thestore/product_info.php/products_id/1245). Unfortunately I didn't find anyone selling the splitter here in Czechia, so I went with 4-port SiI PCI card, which is performing well and stable, but of course quite slow. Some test I googled up at that time suggested that this combo can get about 220MB/s bandwidth through in real life (test was on Win32 though), so at today's drive speeds you can connect ~4-5 drives to one PCI-E without bus bandwidth becoming the limiting factor. Anyway, for really budget machines I can recommend the PCI SiI 3124 based cards, the driver in kernel is working rock-stable for me. Only grudge is that driver doesn't sense if you disconnect a drive from SATA connector, i.e. when you do that, computer will freeze trying to write to disconnected drive. After ~3 minutes it times out and md kicks the drive out of the array, though. If someone has any experience to share about SiI 3132+3726 under linux, I'll be happy to hear about it. According to http://linux-ata.org/software-status.html#pmp it should work, question is how stable it is, since it is recent development. Petr