Hi, following on from a recent thread, can folks with decent multi-port HBA adaptors please chime in with some model numbers of known decent adaptors please? The required use is to grow from currently 8 ish drives to perhaps 12-24 drives per machine. (It partitions out as: one or more RAID6 arrays for data, plus a couple of backup drives) Ideally I would like a controller with writeback cache and BBU since whilst this office machine is likely quite underused, for any sensible amount of IO (some of the other machines we might upgrade) this seems to give a 10-100x increase in IOPs? For the moment it's just a nice to have though I only intend to use linux software raid, so any onboard raid functionality is just a liability. Budget is either low £100 ish for multi-port HBAs without cache, up to £1000 ish for 16-24 port high performance cache controllers: So far I saw recommendations for: - LSI 1068E (SuperMicro 3081E) (8 port 3Gb) - LSI 9211-8i (8 port 6Gb) And to avoid: - Marvel controllers? - Areca with marvel controllers? - AOC-SASLP-MV8 these any good? - LSI MegaRAID 9280-24i4e - Areca ARC-1880ix-24 I'm completely ignorant of the current state of adaptors today: - Are there any bargains to be had in the lower end 8-24 port category (ie come up frequently as ebay specials and aren't locked to special DELL-only disks, etc?) - Cable management. Are there any backplanes for retro fitting into desktop chassis (5 1/4 bays say?) which take single (8087?) connectors? At the moment I just need to refresh our office server (10-12 disks including back drives) and we need something compact and quiet so looking for compact tower chassis options. I'm also looking at adding more storage into our datacenter racks though, so interested in a shopping list of reliable higher performance options? Please add suggestions for good value, reliable controllers known to work well with linux Thanks Ed W -- 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
