Cheap SATA card recommendation

[tonysathre]

Could anyone recommend me a good, yet cheap and reliable SATA II card with 4 ports. I will be using unRAID's software RAID5, so the card doesn't have to have good RAID performance, as I just need to add some SATA II ports. Budget is ~$50 (hopefully).

Thanks,

Tony

[jptheripper]

you didnt say pci or pcie but i am using this one

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816124028

and love it in my WHS.

[PiX64]

i use this one in my unRAID box


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ewill%20RC-218

[tonysathre]

Thanks guys. Those were the 2 that I was actually looking at last week. If I go with a PCI card, will the bus bottleneck newer hard drives? The new drives I ordered are the Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB.

Tony

[PiX64]

interesting read might help make your decision...

this forum is actually quite good for in depth tech questions like pci vs pcie throughput and such

http://www.overclock.net/raid-contro...-question.html

~Pix64

[crusing]

Originally Posted by tonysathre

Thanks guys. Those were the 2 that I was actually looking at last week. If I go with a PCI card, will the bus bottleneck newer hard drives? The new drives I ordered are the Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB.

Tony

Yes. You definitely want PCIe with a 4 port. With the right port multiplication setup you could run up to 20 drives with 4 sata ports. The bus will definitely be the bottleneck.

[tonysathre]

Probably going to go with this card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132018

Gonna pull my Nvidia 8800GTS and stick it in the x16 slot.

Thanks guys.

[stanger89]

You might want to consider something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816101358

You can never have too many ports on a storage server

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You might want to consider something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816101358

You can never have too many ports on a storage server

Plus the fact that miniSAS (basically 4 SATA channels in a single plug) ports are great for cable management.

[toricred]

I'm considering using the AOC-SASLP-MV8 recommended here. Does it work with Windows 7 x64?

[blade]

Originally Posted by tonysathre

Thanks guys. Those were the 2 that I was actually looking at last week. If I go with a PCI card, will the bus bottleneck newer hard drives? The new drives I ordered are the Samsung Spinpoint F4 2TB.

Tony

As others have already said the PCI bus will definitely be a bottleneck.

I just purchased a WD20EARS drive (2TB) and ran some benchmarks comparing the performance between the onboard SATA II port and a SATA II PCI card in my Sage server. Using Diskwriggler, which represents real world usage in a Sage Server more than most benchmarks, my average write speeds dropped from 46MB/s to 41MB/s and the average read speeds fell from 106 MB/s to 64MB/s. Of course the performance would decrease even more if another device such as my old PVR500 was active on the PCI bus.

Using other synthetic benchmarks I saw drops in avg read speeds of 10 MB/s and decreases in burst performance of 60-120MB/s depending on the program used. Diskwriggler is more of what you'll see in real world Sage server performance. Basically it created a 3.5 GB file and wrote it to the disk and read it back. Seemingly very similar to what happens when doing captures and streaming to clients.