mulit SATA HDD card knowledge needed

Rune75

Rune75

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 16, 2004
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I am building a computer for file storage and some gaming and HTPC duty thrown in. It will be based on AMD's quadcore. With this in mind, I am looking for hardware solutions for many (12-16) SATA 500GB or larger hard drives. Any suggestions for SATA cards? I am looking towards a WD Raptor 150 for my primary and WD5000YS for the storage (the WD 750s in time).

I know I am working backwards on this build, but I want to plan around storage, file sharing (on my home network of course), and performance. Of course, I am a cheap bastard and I do not want to pay top dollar unless that is what is called for. Im sure I will be buying 3-4 cards to do this work.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated and read about thoroughly.
 
Are you looking for raid capability? What bus do you have available? Take a look at this and see if something there jumps out at you.
 
I have used Adaptec RAID cards for a long time. Currently for SATA I am using an Adaptec 2810SA card in my Server. For almost 2 years now this card has never once failed me and has been very fast and easy to setup. Added bonus Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003 included the drivers. No need for a floppy on instal.
 
unhappy_mage said:
Are you looking for raid capability? What bus do you have available? Take a look at this and see if something there jumps out at you.
Click to expand...
Nope, I could not give a damn about raid. The card(s) need to support 3Gb/s transfer per port. I will not run optical drives on the card(s). I just want simple storage with mass quantity... the less CPU usage the better (on a cost vs cpu usage ratio). I do not know what all the bus specs will be on the new quad core AMD boards will be.

The Areca arc-1130 sounds great with 12 ports but kinda pricey. The Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 with 8 ports sounds ok too but I would need 2 of them.
 
How about the Highpoint 2340? It's based on the same controller as the ones you linked, but it's only $450 for 16 ports. All it lacks is the hardware acceleration of the Areca.

Why do you consider 3gbps an important feature?
 
unhappy_mage said:
How about the Highpoint 2340? It's based on the same controller as the ones you linked, but it's only $450 for 16 ports. All it lacks is the hardware acceleration of the Areca.

Why do you consider 3gbps an important feature?
Click to expand...
The hard drives that I own are supposedly able to keep that level of performance so I see no reason not to get a 3Gb/s card... but Im eager to hear why I might consider otherwise.

The hardware acceleration... you dont seem to think its worth the money?
 
3gbps is a marketing feature, but in the real world there's very little impact one way or the other. Hard drives can generally sustain 70 or 80 MB/s reads if they're sequential. Once you apply 8/10b coding, you're sending 700 or 800 megabits over a channel that'll support 1500. That's plenty of room for expansion. The only place 3gbps will lead to a marked increase in speed is with a solid-state device that can actually do more than 150 MB/s transfers, or with port multipliers that put transfers for more than one disk on one channel.

Hardware acceleration is for raid 5. Since you're not interested, you don't need it.
 
I've been thinking about this... I do not mind a 2 card solution (read: Im a cheap bastard).

What about using 2 of the supermicro cards vs the Highpoint 2340? Same amount of ports but half the price... am I trying to skimp to much?
 
Nothing wrong with that concept. The Highpoint will have significantly higher transfer rates if you pound on many disks at once, since the Supermicro will be limited by the PCI bus to 120 MB/s or so. But if all you're doing is watching movies from the array, you'll be just fine with them.
 
If you planning on 6+ disks you should consider going raid 5,6 sacraficing 1 hdd of space to protect against drive failure might be worth it to safeguard the data. I used to be all about storage space, i had 9 hdds in my file server with no raid or any backup, then 1 of my 500gb drives died and I lost ton of tv show rips, since then i went with raid 5 solution and currently have 8 x 500gb hdds in raid 5 on highpoint 2320 card.
 
OP, check in to the SuperMicro offerings... AOC-SAT2-MV8

EDIT: NVM, I see you posted it.
 
As it looks like you mostly need to stream data for video, storage for video could be done with USB 2.0 hard drives.
This is extremely cheap and versatile.

A USB 2.0 solution mentioned in another thread is the Drobo
http://drobo.com/

Use a faster drive/connection method for the windows boot drive and other drives that require more than 20mb/s in use.
 
Thanks for all the info, unhappy_mage... Highpoint 2340 it is then :)

Nenu... that drobo thing is gay. Sorry. USB2 does not have the speed I want nor will the device hold the 12-14+ hard drives that I would need it to.
 
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