Need a Reliable SATA controller

[Unknown-One]

I'm setting up a FreeNAS box with eight 500GB hard disks, and I'm looking for a SATA controller that will handle all these while having good Linux support (for FreeNAS). I won't be running RAID on the drives, and although a single 8 port card is preferable, two 4 port cards will work just fine. The most important things to me right now are reliability and low cost, the problem I'm running into is that most SATA controllers with more than 4 ports have hardware RAID, making them VERY expensive.

Is there anything that fits the bill? Thanks for the help!

 

[iroc409]

i believe supermicro makes an 8-port PCI-X card that gets good reviews around here; the best part is i think it runs around $100. no raid functions, IIRC.

 

[DrFreeze]

I'm setting up a FreeNAS box with eight 500GB hard disks, and I'm looking for a SATA controller that will handle all these while having good Linux support (for FreeNAS). I won't be running RAID on the drives, and although a single 8 port card is preferable, two 4 port cards will work just fine. The most important things to me right now are reliability and low cost, the problem I'm running into is that most SATA controllers with more than 4 ports have hardware RAID, making them VERY expensive.

Is there anything that fits the bill? Thanks for the help!

most decent mobos these days come with 4 sata ports on board, why not just use those four and plunk in a cheap 4 port sata controller instead of an 8 port?

 

[Unknown-One]

Because this is going to be a NAS box, meaning it needs very little horsepower, so I'm using extra parts I happen to have on hand.

The Socket-A motherboard I'll be using has no SATA ports built in, which is why I'm looking for a good 4 or 8 port PCI SATA card to use.

 

[gjvrieze]

another vote for the Supermicro 8 port PCI-X card; on most mobos, there is enough room at the end of the pci slots for a PCI-X card to work ok, on some you have to which for caps/etc... Ewiz has them right now foraround $100 with shipping, have bought 2 for my current file server... One other thing to remember, you do take a performance hit with a normal 32bit PCI slot via the PCI-X 64bit slot.. But they are still very nice and most of the time your drives are the bottleneck, not the SATA controller...