PCIe SATA Card

The last time I used a SATA add-on card was a Supermicro SAT2-MV8, which is 64bit PCI-X rather than PCIe, I had to replace the motherboard in that machine but could no longer find a "workstation class" motherboard with even a single PCI-X slot, so had to stop using it.

Generally, I find startech products very good ...

Again, I generally find LSI RAID cards good in Dell and Fujitsu machines.

Presumably you are aware that a PCIe X1 card can be used in X4/X8/X16 slots?

Unfortunately it looks like most (all?) Supermicro HBA or IT-Mode cards are only supported in their own motherboards ...

I am a bit suprised. Normally LSI stuff works. Perhaps an issue with the motherboard?

SCAN have some available with 8 or 16x slots, but the price isn't cheap. Perhaps give them a ring.

I was going to suggest one of the server cards from HP/Dell/Lenovo but I can't figure out hoe to cable them. They seem to use proprietory cables..

Dave

I think something else is going wrong - if the card has been swapped and there's still a problem it may point to something else.

But it could just be Windows being weird. Windows is. The disc array market is heavily slanted towards Linux because that's what most servers are running.

In particular booting off such a card is a whole other question. I suggest booting off a drive hung off a native port and then the JBOD can come up in its own time, once drivers are loaded from the primary drive.

They're usually SFF cables of some kind:

Theo

Thanks for the responses :-)

The card has an Asmedia 1166 chip and, according to reviews, although it is the most popular chip for these cards it is prone to dropping drives on re-boot apparently.

Somebody here did tell me why the Startech 8 port card was bad, technical treatise I should have kept.

The LSI cards are prone to over heat in home PCs.

I've probably got about the best of what's available and will have to live with it.

If you don't mind me asking, why do you need so many SATA devices in the case? The trend is downwards - I have one in mine, a rarely used DVD drive, and although there are four SATA ports two of them will be disabled if one of the M.2 slots is run at PCIe x4 mode. I do have, on the mb, 19 USB ports that run at much faster speeds than the SATA ports. And I offloaded my local data onto ethernet connected NAS devices a few years ago.

In my case, this *is* the ethernet connected NAS we're talking about. It just happens to have a regular PC motherboard rather than be a proprietary box, and a decent CPU not a pathetic embedded thing.

(currently sketching out a new build, but can't de-conflict all the requirements to find products that actually exist)

Theo

It's my server so contains multimedia for streaming round the house and backups/archives.

If you find a motherboard with a few dozen SATA sockets let me know and I'll try and summon the energy for a new build :-)

I have one of those, but it only has three disks

OS, primary data and backup

I'm afraid SATA is dying :-(

Servers may have more slots, but they're likely using a HBA (integrated or separate). I think that's going to be the way to go in future - if you need more SATA you need an add-in card.

Theo

I have the same setup. Once I'd used up the 2 internal SATA ports I just tether USB drives to the server (in this case a 2012 Mac Mini).

I think servers are verging on switching-over to E3.s form factor for NVMe drives ... you can fit 32 of them on a 2U server

Yeah, most compute servers have long gone over to flash, which is NVMe and so PCIe based - need chunky PCIe switches but no host controller as such.

It's only for the bulky but not time critical data that HDD is still relevant, and that's a diminishing role. So SATA and SAS are becoming increasingly niche.

Modern desktop SoCs and chipsets have lanes which can convert between SATA, USB and PCIe, but usually it's the USB or PCIe that manufacturers tend to prioritise as that's what their customers mostly want nowadays.

Theo

Why have three disks when an NVMe, 8 internal drives and a four drive DAS are available.

I didn't have a Meccano set when I was young, my parents couldn't afford one :-)

How about one of these? You can put up to 4 x NVME M2 drives on one card and put it in a PCIe x16 slot?

Note! The Mobo Bios MUST support 4x4 bifurcation which essentially turns that x16 slot into 4 off x4 PCIe virtual slots so each NVME Drive has its own dedicated x4 PCIe slot.

I have a mobo that has 6 off x16 PCIe slots with onboard video so I could in theory have up to 24 NVME M2 drives.... is that enough NVME M2 ports for you? :-)

I know the blurb says it requires specific mohterboards but thats for RoC as in Raid on a Chip, not strictly speaking necessary as these drives are viewable under Disk manager in WIn 11.

Ditto in Linux and you could use software MADM to give you software based RAID if that is important to you.

I am seeing that the price of NVME drives is now approaching the pricing of their equal sized SATA equivalents....

The difficulty is in extracting NVMe cards and running (in the event of a catastrophe), the drives are hot swap, front loading, on a backplane :-)

The 88SE1475 might work, but I can so far only find one card with it, and it really requires someone at the factory who is good with firmware to make it work worth a darn. The card has the ports on the faceplate, and the ports are not internal ones. The power consumption is a bit high, but that might also depend on whether the XOR engine is running.

My old HEDT box has x16,x16 for wiring, but then the lanes aren't all that fast. It isn't much when compared to the speeds of more modern gear.

The purpose of me identifying such a card, is a "no-holds-barred" expansion card. If you want to run eight 530MB/sec SATA SSD in a softraid RAID0 at 4GB/sec, you can. Whereas the majority of the s***ty products, share a single port of bandwidth, over multiple ports, like 530MB/sec / 5 on the Startech card. The RAID0 of that then, could not go faster than a total of 530MB/sec on that group of five ports.

Lots of projects, don't need this level of performance. But considering the state of SATA, it's best to have some nice cards for the future. And not have to worry about all the "inferior card issues" when planning future projects.

If the motherboard PCH ports can manage it, an expansion card should also be able to do it. The motherboard PCH is only limited by the DMI speed (which you should check if planning anything fancy, using only motherboard ports).

CPU ---- video card PCIe Rev5 | | DMI bus | PCH --/-- 6 SATA \ +---- One-standard-slower Southbridge PCIe lane rates...

The PCH is "over-subscribed", if you can manage a test case that abuses all interfaces at once. But normal usage patterns, the PCH/Southbridge isn't too bad. Any whizzy projects, you have to plan for the project. For example, if you come up with an aggressive enough plan, the motherboard for that is around $1200 and the CPU is $10000 :-)

If SATA is going away, I just don't want to "stock up on inferior cards". I am probably only going to have one machine with a lot of hard drives, and not my daily driver.

When the Realtek 10GbE starts shipping, we will have the component needed for remote-NAS work (noisy machine some distance away). There's a danger that one too, will have a lack of PCIe lanes, making it a pig to run flat out (...won't do 10GbE on my old HEDT box).

Paul

I don't really know about this stuff, but rather than hot swap, wouldn't it be safer to have multiple backup servers. One goes down switch to the other.

I'm not sure why a home server needs hot swap. Having backup servers in separate enclosures, separate locations, even in the same house, seems safer.

I suspect you have a power supply problem. Asking 6 or more devices to boot at the same time requires a lot of power. IIRC the remedy is to stagger the booting.