Supermicro USAS-L8i. 8 ports, SAS/SATA2, PCI-Express. I paid about $130 USD for them at buy.com. I got the SAS->SATA2 breakout cables on EBay for about $12.
http://www.buy.com/prod/supermicro-aoc-usas-l8i-8-port-sas-raid-controller-1-x-sas-x4-sas-300/q/loc/101/206007293.html Very good performance, no PCI bottleneck. I have 2 of them in my primary server with 12 1.5TB drives (2 6-disk raidz2). Yes, they cost more than the cheap crappy PCI based cards, but the performance boost is more than worth it. One downside, the brackets are backwards. I just bent the tabs the other way around and it fits fine (take the brackets OFF the card first!). Others have used stand-offs to push the bracket to the next slot cover over. Gigabit is now my bottleneck, but I do a fair bit of processing locally on that box, so I'm fine with it. The array can sustain about 350MB/s writing a 50GB file (local RAM is 8GB). And that's with "green" drives running at 5400RPM. I just bought a motherboard with 3 x16 slots. I believe they run at x8 when 3 cards are installed, but that's what the L8i cards run at anyway, and I don't care if video is a little slower on that machine as I rarely use the monitor anyway. If I end up needing more drives, I'll buy a PCI card for video and get another L8i for drives. :) I have a SIL3114 based card in my backup server, the performance is really bad. Last time I tried benchmarking it I got about 50MB/s. I don't care as it's just a place to dump off-site backups, but I would never use one for a main server. I have also had another one die on me after about 3 months. -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-help mailing list opensolaris-help@opensolaris.org
