Recommended SATA card?

[Owen Townend]

On 17/06/2008, James Dinkel <jdinkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 3:03 PM, David Abrahams
>  <dave at boost-consulting.com> wrote:
>  > Hi,
>  >
>  > I need to expand the internal disk capacity on my server, and all my mobo's 4
>  > SATA ports are occupied.  Can anyone recommend an SATA card that will work well
>  > with Ubuntu?
>  >
>
>
> The controller is going to be the issue here.  Any brands of cards
>  that use the same controller are going to be equally supported.  You
>  could check what controller is on your motherboard and try to get a
>  card with that same controller.  However, the Promise SATA controller
>  is very popular and I *believe* is well supported in linux.
>
>
>  James

Hey,
  James is right, the controller is the important part to consider
here for compatability.
  If you are only after sata ports and not hardware raid then I'd
suggest the Silicon Image SiL3114/3124 chipset cards (SATA I/II, four
ports). They're supported natively by the kernel, so no third party
drivers needed and I've seen them around for ~US$30/$60 on ebay. The
main drawback of pci sata is IIRC the maximum bandwidth of the pci bus
is roughly 80 MiB/s. If you're after hardware raid but haven't yet
done your research I'd suggest reading the through adaptec's storage
advisor[2] pages, they focus on the tech rather than adaptec specifics
which is handy.

cheers,
Owen.

Footnotes:
--
[1] http://storageadvisors.adaptec.com