[mythtv-users] Question re: available SATA ports and linux software RAID

[John P Poet]

Just for another data point, I have a one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132018

and it has worked perfectly in my mythbackend.  To get full bandwidth, I
have it plugged into PCIe 4 lane slot.

I also have a couple of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124017

Which works well, if all you have are single lane PCIe slots available.

One thing to be aware of with these "dumb" cards, is that if they have a
BIOS (which allows you to boot off of them), then your motherboard will only
"see" so many of the cards, before it won't recognize any more of them.  For
example, I can't plug more than two of those 2-port cards into my
motherboard, because it won't see a third one.  That 4-port card I listed
first does *not* have a bootable bios on it, which means that I was able to
add it to my system (in addition to the two 2-port cards) and have it work.

In general, I like that 4-port card a bit better than the 2-port cards.  I
get *slightly* better performance with it, and since it does not have the
BIOS, my system boots faster with it, since the motherboard isn't testing
it.  It does not get detected until linux does it's probe.

I have a total of 12 devices hooked up between those cards, and the on-board
SATA ports, divided up into a pair of RAID5 arrays.

One complaint with these cards, is that they don't have locking SATA
connectors.

John
-- 
A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.mythtv.org/pipermail/mythtv-users/attachments/20110407/65de995c/attachment.html