Recommended SATA card?

[David Abrahams]

on Mon Jun 16 2008, "Owen Townend" <owen.townend-AT-gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

Duh, for some reason I didn't catch his drift before.  Now I think he
was suggesting that I use a card with the same controller chip as my
onboard SATA because I know it works. (Sorry, James!)

>   If you are only after sata ports and not hardware raid

That's me.

> 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. 

That's a lot cheaper than some of the 3ware cards I've seen.

> The main drawback of pci sata is IIRC the maximum bandwidth of
> the pci bus is roughly 80 MiB/s. 

Oof.  I suppose there's no getting around a limitation like that
one... hmm, is there an SATA controller I can drive with firewire?  What
people who care about performance do when their onboard SATA fills up?
Buy an external SATA drive cage that runs over firewire (or some such
thing?)

> 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.

Well, I've done quite a bit already, but one can always do more
research.  When is enough enough?  I dunno, but I'm thinking maybe I
should stop here for now and invest the US ~$30/$60 to see how an
SiL3124 card works out.

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com