[CentOS] "dumb" SATA controller recommendation

[Chris Mauritz]

David Thompson wrote:

>Chris Mauritz wrote:
>  
>
>>Just wondering if any 4.2 users out there have a favourite "dumb" PCI 
>>controller to add a couple of SATA ports to a motherboard that doesn't 
>>include SATA support.  I'm not looking for anything fancy, just 2 SATA 
>>ports that a recent vintage kernel will recognize without a lot of 
>>configuration gymnastics.  The intended use is for relatively light 
>>weight internet browser workstations for younger students.
>>    
>>
>
>I benchmarked a number of low-end sata controllers for add-on, JBOD 
>applications, and found that some give significantly lower performance than 
>others.  One of the good cards performance-wise turned out to be based on a 
>SiI 3112 chipset, delivering performance very similar to intel's ICH6 
>(i865-based) motherboard sata controllers, and better than any others I found. 
> That being said, I have not been able to deploy that card in a PCI-X based 
>system; it hangs the (64-bit PCI-X) bus and won't let the computer boot.
>
>We use lots of 3ware sata controllers, and for jbod, they deliver 
>significantly lower performance than either the ICH6- or 3112- based 
>controllers.
>
>So I'm also looking for a 'yeah, it's cheap, it just works, and it delivers 
>the full performance of the disk' sata controller.
>  
>

Well, these are just a bunch of old i810e and i815 boards running P3 
processors on a standard PCI bus.  So I'll have to find a guinea pig 
SiL3112 board to try (any particular brand?).  I don't really even care 
if they're that cheap, but they're only going to be used as dumb 
controllers so RAID isn't really necessary.  I donated a bunch of these 
systems to a school and agreed to help them integrate things with CentOS 
as the OS.  Another donor bought a big box of SATA drives (the systems 
originally had a bunch of rather old 20gig quantum fireball drives) so 
I'm trying to help them combine both gifts without an undue amount of 
support for them down the road.

Cheers,