<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Graham Mitchell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gmitch@woodlea.com">gmitch@woodlea.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div class="im">> If you pick your hardware right, you can get by much cheaper with esata +<br>
> port multipliers at little to no performance penalty, especially if you<br>
> design the wiring so that drives on the same port multiplier are in<br>
> different logical groups. Port multipliers come in 1x5 versions, so 4<br>
> esata ports == 20 drives. See the sata maillist for hardware that works.<br>
<br>
<br>
</div>I used these as the 2 PCIe cards in my server<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adsa3gpx1.asp" target="_blank">http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adsa3gpx1.asp</a><br>
<br>
You can get them cheaper, but I wanted a single stop solution for myself.<br>
You need to make sure that any SATA card you get is port multiplier ready,<br>
which the Sil 3132 chips are.<br>
<br>
For the port multipliers, I used these<br>
<br>
<a href="http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm.asp" target="_blank">http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/ad5sapm.asp</a><br>
<br>
(I also used a couple of bridge boards<br>
(<a href="http://www.addonics.com/products/multilane/connector.asp" target="_blank">http://www.addonics.com/products/multilane/connector.asp</a>) to connect the<br>
server processor box to the external disk box. I would stongly recommend NOT<br>
doing that... just use eSata cables and be done - the Infiniband cable<br>
(<a href="http://www.addonics.com/products/other/default.asp#ml" target="_blank">http://www.addonics.com/products/other/default.asp#ml</a>) was the single most<br>
expensive component, and to be honest, wasn't worth it).<br>
<br>
</blockquote><div><br>Another nod for the addonics stuff. I run their 5 hdd hot swap bay in my master backend/fileserver, connected into there 5->1 PM, connected to a 1x PCIe card. I think the 1x lane of PCIe is the bottleneck, but I don't notice. Been running that setup for 18 months<br>
<br>Also agreeing with the fact that you don't need crazy power for drives... i have 11 seagates humming, with a 2.66 GHZ c2q and an nvidia 8600 all running off of a 550W powersupply. <br></div></div><br>