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,