hardware for home use large storage

[Alexander Motin]

Dan Langille wrote:
> Alexander Motin wrote:
>> Steve Polyack wrote:
>>> On 2/10/2010 12:02 AM, Dan Langille wrote:
>>>> Don't use a port multiplier and this goes away.  I was hoping to avoid
>>>> a PM and using something like the Syba PCI Express SATA II 4 x Ports
>>>> RAID Controller seems to be the best solution so far.
>>>>
>>>> http://www.amazon.com/Syba-Express-Ports-Controller-SY-PEX40008/dp/B002R0DZWQ/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1258452902&sr=1-22
>>>>
>>> Dan, I can personally vouch for these cards under FreeBSD.  We have 3 of
>>> them in one system, with almost every port connected to a port
>>> multiplier (SiI5xxx PMs).  Using the siis(4) driver on 8.0-RELEASE
>>> provides very good performance, and supports both NCQ and FIS-based
>>> switching (an essential for decent port-multiplier performance).
>>>
>>> One thing to consider, however, is that the card is only single-lane
>>> PCI-Express.  The bandwidth available is only 2.5Gb/s (~312MB/sec,
>>> slightly less than that of the SATA-2 link spec), so if you have 4
>>> high-performance drives connected, you may hit a bottleneck at the
>>> bus.   I'd be particularly interested if anyone can find any similar
>>> Silicon Image SATA controllers with a PCI-E 4x or 8x interface ;)
>>
>> Here is SiI3124 based card with built-in PCIe x8 bridge:
>> http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adsa3gpx8-4em.asp
>>
>> It is not so cheap, but with 12 disks connected via 4 Port Multipliers
>> it can give up to 1GB/s (4x250MB/s) of bandwidth.
>>
>> Cheaper PCIe x1 version mentioned above gave me up to 200MB/s, that is
>> maximum of what I've seen from PCIe 1.0 x1 controllers. Looking on NCQ
>> and FBS support it can be enough for many real-world applications, that
>> don't need so high linear speeds, but have many concurrent I/Os.
> 
> Is that the URL you meant to post?  "4 Port eSATA PCI-E 8x Controller
> for Mac Pro".  I'd rather use internal connections.

Not exactly what I meant, as it is a Mac version, but yes. At least such
controllers exist. May be they also could be found with internal SATA.

-- 
Alexander Motin