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SATA Controller Recommendation

muzicman82

Weaksauce
Joined
Mar 17, 2010
Messages
78
Hello all,

I just picked up the Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 from OWC. I have this connected to one of the ports on my RR2300 controller, via a eSATA-SATA header.

I'd really like to have a total of 3 externally available SATA ports. I'd use an eSATA header on my on-board SATA controller, except that I have to use the generic IDE driver for TRIM support on my new Intel X25-M. This kills hotplug functionality on the motherboard.

So, can someone recommend either an additional PCIe SATA Controller that has only two eSATA ports, OR a controller to replace my RR2300 that has around 2 Internal ports and 4 eSATA ports?
 
Rosewill RC218. PCIe x4. I got 450MB/s using two external ports. I saw one review (sonnet e4p, same chipset) claimed ~900MB/s using all four sata ports with 20 hard disks in four enclosures.

If you want to go with PCIex1, any cheap Sil3132 based card will do, which limits you to 125MB/s.
 
You mean you got 450 Mbps with two ports, two drives in RAID? I'll take a look at that card. Do you mean 45 MB/s (megabytes per second) or 450? 450 MB/s would be like almost a terabyte transfer in a few seconds. If only....

Right now, I'm getting around 50-60 MB/s from a single drive on my Highpoint card in JBOD, transferring to the OWC enclosure.

I'm more interested in really good performance on single eSATA ports. This Highpoint card does a decent job with RAID0 for only two drives. I used to have 4 drives on the card in RAID0, but I just took them and a bunch of other drives out. It just got too hot inside that chasis to make it worth it. So, it's just the two in RAID0 and my SSD now. I'm kind of liking how quiet and cool it is.
 
450MB/s on two ports with 10 disks, that's one 25GB blu-ray in less than 1 minute. 250MB/s per port.

Code:
RC218 --> SIL3762 --sata--> HDD0
    |           \---sata--> HDD1
    |           \---sata--> HDD2
    |           \---sata--> HDD3
    |           \---sata--> HDD4
    \ --> SIL3762 --sata--> HDD5
                \---sata--> HDD6
                \---sata--> HDD7
                \---sata--> HDD8
                \---sata--> HDD9
 
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