PCI (not PCI-E) controller that supports 4TB?

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NetTechie

Limp Gawd
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Jan 10, 2014
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I'm considering putting together some old hardware I have, and I'm wondering if it is possible, as this would be for a server, to run 4TB hard drives in it. The slots are PCI, meaning I'm limited to what was available as far as SATA controllers that run on PCI.

Anyone know of a controller that is PCI (not pci-e) that supports the 4TB drives?
 
Looks like the Sil3114 controller allows 3TB. Wonder if there was a 4TB controller ever made for PCI?
 
Straight PCI or PCI-X? What RAID level are you trying to utilize? How many drives do you need to be connected?
 
Straight PCI I think... whatever an Abit NF7-S2 motherboard will run. I'm still working on what I'd do with it, but I'm looking at setting up a NAS server. Probably I can get by with 4 drives to start with. Wonder if I can run 2 Sil3114 controllers at once on one motherboard?
 
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Again, what RAID level are you looking to run and what OS are you planning on using? Since it is a NAS I would expect you want some level of uptime protection. What CPU is installed and how much RAM, depending on your config you might be happy going with one of the AIO ZFS implementations and just cheap SATA PCI cards vs running the linked card in R5 mode (which will be SLOW).
 
Ok, I'm thinking to run just Raid 0, I haven't set up a raid like this before, but I plan to maybe just start with 2 drives and add more later when I need more space.

OS I'm looking at running is FreeNAS.
 
Ok, I'm thinking to run just Raid 0, I haven't set up a raid like this before, but I plan to maybe just start with 2 drives and add more later when I need more space.
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This is a good way to lose all of your data. Do not run raid0 on any data you care about.
 
You could get a cheap PCI video card and use the PCI-E 16x slot for a SATA controller. I'd also put in an gigabit ethernet card (preferably Intel), that motherboard only has 10/100.

My first FreeNAS server was a 1GHz Athlon with 384 MB of RAM and a handful of 250 GB drives. It worked fine for storing my DVD/music/disk image collection, though it was painfully slow (by today's standards) to copy things over to it. The main draw of FreeNAS nowadays is the ZFS filesystem. You'd need better hardware for that.

drescherjm said:
This is a good way to lose all of your data. Do not run raid0 on any data you care about.
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Agreed. You really shouldn't be using RAID 0 on a storage server.
 
Hmm, ok, so maybe RAID 5 then? Am I required to run a RAID on a NAS server? I guess I'm not sure how an NAS drive appears on a network, as a single drive or as a computer with shared hard drives?

My motherboard has AGP for the video, but I do have another computer that has PCI Express for video, around the same performance. Pentium 4, but I don't have much ram for it. Here is the system I was thinking of building, quoted from my NAS topic:

Some old hardware I have, not really sure if it would be useful with an NAS server, but here goes:

If a lot of cpu performance is not important, I have a 32bit Athlon XP 3200+ processor and Abit NF7-S motherboard. I could run it with a PCI Sil3124 SATA II raid controller, and a PCI gigabit network card. I have 3GB of ram for it, or I could do 2gb for dual channel I think. I've got some old passively cooled AGP video cards for it, since video doesn't matter on an NAS I don't think, just something to set it up. I also have a working IDE DVD drive for the install, so that wouldn't use any sata ports. I have a 300 watt seasonic power supply that would work with it I think. I tested it and it's fan hasn't died, runs silent with an 80mm fan. Power supply is rated at >80% efficient it says. I also have a Antec Solo black/silver case which holds 4 internal hard drives and blows 2x 92mm (air filtered) fans on them. The drives are oriented parallel to the case, so the air blows over the drives into the case. I tested the fans, totally silent and running fine. Additionally, I have hot swap 5.25" bays, I could install 4 in the case, though they wouldn't have any direct cooling. I think I have about six of these, so no cost to buy them. Total cost out of pocket, less than $50 to set this up, plus the drive costs.

Think I could get by with this list of antiquated of hardware? I would be limited to 3TB drives with this setup I think, running at SATA II speeds.
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Would the above work with FreeNAS and a ZFS filesystem?
 
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Be careful, that old PoS board has a nForce chipset.

Cut losses and bin it. Plenty of cheap Board, Chip & RAM packs on eBay for a lot less heartache.
 
Athlon XP (64?) file server with a bunch of disks in RAID 0? You might as well just delete all your data now instead of waiting for the inevitable.

Buy a cheap Atom based motherboard instead. It will pay for itself with the reduced power consumption and you won't have to rely on 10 year old hardware. You'll thank us later.
 
Blue Fox said:
Buy a cheap Atom based motherboard instead. It will pay for itself with the reduced power consumption and you won't have to rely on 10 year old hardware. You'll thank us later.
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Could you link a couple like you would recommend on ebay? I didn't find any searching, that looked decent. New they aren't that bad of a price for a motherboard/processor combo on newegg, but might be overkill to get a new one?
 
Been kinda fun looking through all my old parts, I found a couple SATA II controllers too, with 4 headers each. Sil3114 is one of them, not sure what the other runs. It's still available new on newegg, so I'd guess it supports 3TB drives.

If I could get this rig to work, it'd cost me $15 out of pocket for a gigabit network card. What is the risk with an nforce chipset? By the way, I have a Rev. 2.0 board I'm pretty sure. So it's a newer rev of the nForce chipset.
 
I don't think sata controllers ever had an issue with big disks. I believe there are just bios limits for the boot drive an mbr vs gpt issues for the partitions.
 
My boot drive would be a sata 80gb drive I have I think. Then the big drives would be for storage. (I can't boot from usb with this motherboard, so I'd have to run an internal drive).
 
NetTechie said:
Hmm, ok, so maybe RAID 5 then? Am I required to run a RAID on a NAS server? I guess I'm not sure how an NAS drive appears on a network, as a single drive or as a computer with shared hard drives?
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From what I've seen, RAID 6 or RAIDZ2 (if using ZFS) is recommended when you have more than 8TB+ of data due to the huge strain of a RAID rebuild of that much data in the event of a HDD crash. That huge strain can sometimes cause a second HDD to crash/die and therefore the RAID array would be lost (if using RAID 5). RAID 6 or RAIDZ2 at allows for you to lose two drives before total data loss.

As for whether or not RAID is needed, not necessarily. RAID is recommended since it's the simplest way to make sure your data is somewhat safe-ish and to simplify data management (i.e everything under one drive/volume). Other methods that don't technically involve RAID would be:
- Drive Bender
- Stablebit Drivepool
- SnapRAID
- FlexRAID
- Windows 8 Storage Spaces

As for how a NAS drive appears on a network, you can do both actually: First, from the server you share the volume/hard drive/array (where your data is stored) with the network. Then on the client PCs, you can just mount the network drive so that it'll just show up as a regular drive under Windows Explorer.
NetTechie said:
Would the above work with FreeNAS and a ZFS filesystem?
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As noted by everyone else as well as myself in your other thread, not really.

NetTechie said:
If I could get this rig to work, it'd cost me $15 out of pocket for a gigabit network card. What is the risk with an nforce chipset? By the way, I have a Rev. 2.0 board I'm pretty sure. So it's a newer rev of the nForce chipset.
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Because NForce chipsets are notoriously known for their unreliability and stability issues. Hell even back in 2007 they were unreliable with their newer chipsets. For a file server, that's just a bad idea to a known unreliable platform.
 
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I think a big part of the nForce chipset problems is they would overheat. I had to put a Zalman chipset heatsink on mine, to keep it cool enough. The system was used for years for gaming, back in the day, and I never experienced any reliability problems with it. It might become unreliable running 3TB size drives though, not sure.
 
NetTechie said:
I think a big part of the nForce chipset problems is they would overheat. I had to put a Zalman chipset heatsink on mine, to keep it cool enough. The system was used for years for gaming, back in the day, and I never experienced any reliability problems with it. It might become unreliable running 3TB size drives though, not sure.
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While the cooling is helpful, it's still unreliable overall. Still wouldn't trust it even if there was enough performance. Which by the way was the other reasons people in this very thread are recommending against reusing that setup.
 
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