Does PCI-E SATA card quality matter if i'm using linux EVMS?

[Fryguy8]

Is there any reason to not just go with the cheapest 4-port pci-e SATA card I can find if I'm not going to be using any of the raid functionality on it, opting for linux evms instead?

 

[spotter]

you want something that linux supports well. For instance, not all sata chipsets will Linux be able to do SMART over.... (think it was a problem w/ the common marvel chipset for a while, but might have been fixed of late).

 

[unhappy_mage]

If it's so bad it drops disks, it'll kill your raid 5 pretty fast. And ask for opinions before you buy - I haven't had any luck with the Marvell chipset under Linux. Under Solaris it's rather well-supported, though.

 

[bexamous]

Who even makes a cheap pcie sata controller? Hardware raid card will still have better performance... if you enable its write cache. Anyways I ran EVMS over two addin PCI sil3114 controllers ($20 each) and one onboard... 12 ports total on PCI bus. Never had any problems.

Marvell controller still sucks in Linux but yea its great if you want to run Solaris and ZFS over it.

Also EVMS is really overkill for alot of stuff but its fun to use... I wouldn't recommend using it for your boot drive, it becomes a pain if you update your kernel very often.

 

[drizzt81]

Who even makes a cheap pcie sata controller?

there are quite a few companies that make them, but they usually come with a whopping - are you sitting down? - two (2) ports.