On Wednesday 22 June 2022 at 00:10:51, o1bigtenor via Dng wrote:
> Have found some PCIe 3.0 cards with 16 SATA port count.
>
> Do I need any kind of special driver to use this many SATA ports?
tito has a good question - what sort of cards are they?
But, in principle, no, you do not need any special driver to use a ridiculous
number of SATA ports, or disks with any sort of connection.
I have a machine with a motherboard having 6 SATA ports, into which are
connected one SSD and five HDDs; it also has two USB3 ports into which are
plugged two Fantec 8-drive external cabinets, each containing 8 SATA disks, so
the total range of my /dev/sdX devices is /dev/sda to /dev/sdv.
The standard (Beowulf at present) kernel just handles this fine. I can do MD-
RAID and LVM2 (and also both) with the devices with no problem.
Many years ago I did the same sort of thing with IDE - I had PCI cards with
two IDE connectors, each connector capable of two devices each (master +
slave), and I could build machines with four such cards in (so, 4 x 2 x 2 = 16
drives in total) again without doing anything special to the kernel.
Antony.
--
"When you talk about Linux versus Windows, you're talking about which
operating system is the best value for money and fit for purpose. That's a very
basic decision customers can make if they have the information available to
them. Quite frankly if we lose to Linux because our customers say it's better
value for money, tough luck for us."
- Steve Vamos, MD of Microsoft Australia
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