Recommended SATA card?

[Owen Townend]

On 17/06/2008, David Abrahams <dave at boostpro.com> wrote:
>
>  on Mon Jun 16 2008, "Owen Townend" <owen.townend-AT-gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  > 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.
>
>

Hey,
  Note, the 80 megabyte per second limit is a realistic limit given on
the aforementioned adaptec pages IIRC. This actually quite close to
the Firewire 800 limit ( 800 megabits per second = 800*10^6/(8*2^20)
~= 95MiB/s theoretical max).
  To get around the pci bandwidth limit the options are limited to
PCI-E and PCI-X which should both give ample headroom. I've seen the
SiL3124 chipset in both of these varieties, though they're a little
more expensive.
  For me I've gone the PCI route as I was low on storage, not performance.

HTH,
cheers,
Owen.