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,
