If you're looking at port multipliers, you need to find PCI-Express modules if you want them to be fast. The PCI ones are gonna be very slow when you have more than 2 disks per card. An alternative would be buying server motherboards that have 10+ ports. I found a few on newegg before. Here're some: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131287 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131239 They have 6 SATA & 8 SAS (SATA disks work on SAS ports, but SAS disks don't work on SATA ports) 3 PCI-E ports! (If you get a 4-port PCI-e card, then you get 12 ports in addition to the built-in 14). You might want to checkout Supermicro's offerings as well. I hope this helps. On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 3:56 PM, Drew<drew.kay@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Hi, > > I've been reading up on port multipliers and I was wondering if > anyone's had any experience with them they'd like to share. From what > I've read of them I would expect the performance to be slower but how > much slower are they in the real world? > > I ask because I'm exploring options for my organization and we're > looking at some large JBOD enclosures that can handle up to 15 SATA > drives and I'm trying to minimize performance impact on the drives > while at the same time minimize the amount of cabling between the > openfiler and the enclosure. The server using the enclosure will be > running openfiler as a backend iSCSI target(?) for a couple of VMware > ESXi hosts and while the hosts won't be running anything heavy duty, > mainly just filesharing & email, I'm hoping to keep things running as > fast as possible. > > > -- > Drew > > "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." > --Marie Curie > -- > To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in > the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html > -- Majed B. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
