Dual Controller Cards

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LostFor

n00b
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Jul 12, 2008
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Hi all
I am working on building a filer server for home, it will be based off of an older AMD 64 3200+ cpu on a MSI K8N neo motherboard
The motherboard has two IDE ports and only 2 sata 1 ports so I will be using a
Promise SATA 300 TX4 PCI 4 Port SATA II Controller Card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816102062
I am wondering if I would be able to install two of these cards
The motherboard has 4 open pci 32 bit slots.

Thanks for the help
 
PCI is shared bandwidth with a maximum throughput of 133MB/s, so there can be some bottlenecking going on if you plan to put, say, two controllers with 8 SATA drives connected.
 
had 4 4p pci controllers once
when you just store the data its ok and when access each drive individualy, you wont notice anything
but if you chose to move it from one controllers drive to other its gona be slow - ~30-40mb tops since real pci throughput is around 80mb :p
 
Cool
The main thing is that it will be on a fileserver so most of the moves will be onto or off of the server and very little from one card to another
 
I don't know how Promise will take it, so I don't recommend it. You run the potential for some configuration glitching, so test thoroughly before putting data on it. The only controllers I recommend installing in N+1 sets are LSI Elite16nn's, Ultra320's, and fiber channel because they're all designed for it. Most others take the stance that your upgrade path is a bigger controller, not an additional controller.
 
Assuming you are going to do something like Linux software raid5, you will probably be ok. I have used that particular card for this on an old server and it worked well. If you are talking about some other kind of raid such as windows raid, then I can't say yes or no with much confidence.

I have not used more than one of those cards in a machine at once but I have used others, the only times I have run into problems with machines using multiple controller cards and a raid is when the cards themselves were controlling a raid rather than the os itself.

Using one giant controller or fiber channel device like areess mentioned may be more of an ideal solution with unlimited money, as more components equals more potential problems. But given the specs you listed I am guessing that sort of hardware is outside the budget you have for this project.

And like others have said, traffic across the controllers, like one large array writing from and to itself, or two arrays moving files between them, speeds will be brutal. But for copying on and off one big array your network will likely be the bottleneck.
 
Yes my budget for this is very limited mostly what I am trying to do is to create a fileserver that me and my friends can use to store our media on. To start with I am not planing on any raid set up until I get a few Hard Drives into the case. My hope is to be able to use all SATA II drives so when I update the motherboard/cpu I will not have to many IDE drives.
Thanks for the help I think I will start with one of these cards and as I add more Hard drives get another, from what I have read it should work
 
Also keep in mind that if and when you create a raid array you will have to destroy all the data on those drives during the raid creation. Well technically there are ways you can have it copy data to the array as it's being created but it's a pain to do and dangerous.

So if at some point you do go from a bunch of misc drives full of stuff to one giant raid5 you will need a lot of free space somewhere.
 
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