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
