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. Dave Thompson The University of Wisconsin - Madison