PCI based Sata controller card?

[Biggen]

My motherboard is maxed out as far as Sata connectors go so I was thinking about adding in a PCI card (saving the PCIe slots for other items) that has at least 4 SATA connectors on it. What are some good recommendations. I don't care about RAID. Just want an inexpensive card that works well with Windows 7.

My movie hard drives will be the only things attached to the card so read/write speeds really doesn't matter.

[panteragstk]

If you don't need RAID I would go with one of these two. There are cheaper options out there, but remember that you get what you pay for. Off brand RAID cards have always given me issues. Even a dirt cheap promise card I had back in the day was a total POS. Keep that in mind.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816102065

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816115030

[Biggen]

Cool. I'll check them out.

[DMT]

I used the PROMISE SATA300 TX4 (link above) in my Atom D510 Windows Home Server for about a year. I think I was getting transfer speeds up to 60 MB/Second. I never was able to read drive temps from ports 3 and 4 for some reason but that's about it. There are also some cheaper options.

[Biggen]

The reviews aren't steller on that Promise card. Also, it doesn't look like it works on 2TB drives which is what I would be installing. I'll keep looking...

[davephan]

This is the sata card recommended for unRAID builds:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816101358

The Supermicro card can control 8 sata drives, but does not have raid built-in, it is PCI Express X4, so you will need the PCI-EX4 or greater. The card has two mini-sas connectors on it. You will also need two SAS to sata cables, each about $20

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816116097

The unRAID forum does not recommend using PCI controller cards due to poor performance. I am guessing the same reasons would apply to other operating systems.

If you don't care about RAID, then are you copying files between drives to protect the files? If a drive fails, are those files just going to be lost? That might be OK. But after the drive failure, you might wish you had redundancy.

Dave

[Biggen]

Originally Posted by davephan

This is the sata card recommended for unRAID builds:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816101358

The Supermicro card can control 8 sata drives, but does not have raid built-in, it is PCI Express X4, so you will need the PCI-EX4 or greater. The card has two mini-sas connectors on it. You will also need two SAS to sata cables, each about $20

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816116097

The unRAID forum does not recommend using PCI controller cards due to poor performance. I am guessing the same reasons would apply to other operating systems.

If you don't care about RAID, then are you copying files between drives to protect the files? If a drive fails, are those files just going to be lost? That might be OK. But after the drive failure, you might wish you had redundancy.

Dave

RAID doesn't appeal to me in this situation. RAID is more about limited to no downtime which isn't what I need in a HTPC server. Here is what I have so you can get a better understanding of where I am coming from.

I have 3 internal Hard Drives in my SageTV server and 2 external drives for backup purposes. They are as follows:

1. One internal drive is dedicated toward the OS. It gets imaged via Windows 7 backup to an external drive. I took your advice and decided to make a second image (using Macrium Reflect) of this OS drive as well in case Windows backup doesn't work properly. I save that image to yet another external drive that is separate from the Windows backup external drive. The odds of both images being "borked" on two different external drives are slim to none IMO and this should be sufficient.

2. Another internal hard drive is dedicated towards Sage recordings. There is no backup for this drive as recordings are not "mission critical" in the event of a crash.

3. The last internal hard drive is dedicated for my movie library. It is a 2TB drive that is currently half full. This drive is synced (mirrored) with a second external hard drive that is also 2TB in size. The second external drives also holds the emergency backup Macrium Reflect image of my OS drive I mentioned above.

Now I'm in no rush for a controller card as I still have 1TB of space left on my movie library hard drive. However, as it begins to fill up, I just wanted to be on the lookout for a PCI controller. Again, I really want a PCI based controller card. My motherboard only has two PCI-E slots and I already have one of those filled with a 2250 tuner.

When my movie library drive does become full, I'll make sure the external is fully synced with it and I'll retire that external drive to the closet (or maybe the internal will be put in the closet?), purchase another internal drive and external drive (maybe 3-4 TB by that time?) and start the process anew.

[davephan]

You might consider using SyncBack to copy the folders to the USB hard drives. The SyncBack free version should work fine.

Dave

[jphipps]

I have been using several exteranl eSata boxes and the are really working well. I have a few of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-137-_-Product

as well as a few made by Rockwell. you can get them as large as 10 drive unites and them come with a pci-e esata card that has 2 ports to allow to units connected to each card.

The cards can do raid but you can use them as regular JBOD disks. If you think you may want to use RAID in the future, I use Rocket RAID 620 cards for mine configured as RAID-5 so I have the redundancy and only cost my 1 disk per unit. The rocket raid cards are also supported on Win7 64bit ( I am using...), but also on Mac and linux.

Thanks,
Jeff