Best high-end PCI SATA card?

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MountainX

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 2, 2008
Messages
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I need a fast PCI-Express card that will support 4 SATA-II HDDs. All I seem to find when searching is either cheap cards with 1-3 ports or high end RAID cards. I don't want a RAID card (already have one), but I do want a reliable and good performing SATA card at a price point less than the RAID cards. Any advice?
 
Do you intend to run RAID on these cards (like RAID5) or just hook up your disks to this PCIe card?
 
I'm looking for a non-RAID card that is fast - say, PCI-e 8x or 16x with some cache memory, etc. I might use software RAID-10 (Linux), but I do not want one of those fake-raid cards. If I were going to run RAID-5, I would just use my Areca ARC-1220 controller.
 
You are basically going to be looking at a regular raid card and disable raid on it.
 
Ockie said:
You are basically going to be looking at a regular raid card and disable raid on it.
Click to expand...

Thanks. So I guess I'll be keeping my ARC-1220 and replacing the Samsung drives with Seagates (or something else that works with that card) as you suggested in another thread.

I do not see any alternative controller that looks attractive. Since I have the ARC-1220, once I get new drives, I will probably use RAID-5 with that controller. (I mean it would not make sense to disable RAID on the Areca and use software RAID instead. I was only looking for an alternative to the Areca to see if I could find a way to keep the Samsung HDDs that made sense. I don't see any good alternative except to keep the Areca card and replace the HDDs.)

Thanks again for your advice.
 
MountainX said:
I do not see any alternative controller that looks attractive.
Click to expand...

Consider the LSI controllers; they're fast, and if you're just doing raid 0/1/10 on them they'll even do that in hardware. For example, the LSI 3081 ($280) will support 8 SAS or sata disks just fine, or more with an expander. It's an option, anyways. I don't know offhand where the supported disks list is, but you might be able to find it.
 
MountainX said:
I need a fast PCI-Express card that will support 4 SATA-II HDDs. All I seem to find when searching is either cheap cards with 1-3 ports or high end RAID cards. I don't want a RAID card (already have one), but I do want a reliable and good performing SATA card at a price point less than the RAID cards. Any advice?
Click to expand...

I think you can pick up the Dell Perc5e/i's on Ebay for a 100 or so, I would bet that would be pretty quick...
 
I appreciate the suggestions, but I think I'll just keep my ARC-1220. I know it has out of the box support in Linux (Ubuntu) and selling it to buy something else would probably not be financially advantageous. I'd probably lose at least $100 when selling the Areca, then I'd have to spend all the proceeds for another card that isn't as good as the Areca.
 
I use 2 promise TX4 cards. They are PCI. Not PCI Express. 4 Sata ports per card. I have them loaded up and have very good performance. I can stream HD video and have my shares mounted on my desktop system and use them as if they were local. No slowdowns.

You really don't need much here.
 
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