I'm looking at buying a NORCO DS-1220 and it comes with a NORCO 4618 PCI-X card (4 port eSATA, with a port multiplier on the card or the chassis). I've been trying to pin down whether or not CentOS will see all 12 drives, and I haven't seen anything that is definitive. I see that the kernel module sata_sil24 supports the SiI3124 chip on the NORCO 4618 card, but I haven't found whether or not the default kernel will support the SiI3726 (PMP) without the libata-tj patch.
I'm just trying to determine the easiest route to go with minimal cost. I've found another enclosure that uses 4 mini-SAS connectors, but in addition to the extra $320 for the enclosure, I'd need to buy a $300 card and at least one $120 cable (either SFF-8088 to SFF-8470 or a straight SFF-8088). While this is for at home, I would consider this a "mission critical" device and don't want a flakey setup, which is what I have now...I've become an expert at recovering from a 2 drive failure in a 4 drive RAID5 setup using mdadm.
Any ideas, suggestions, or authoritative comments?
--Tim ________________________________________________________________________________ < You're definitely on their list. The question to ask next is what list it is. > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- \ \ \ \ /\ ( ) .( o ).