Harry Putnam wrote:
Erik Trimble <erik.trim...@oracle.com> writes:
Bottom line: if you can live without true hot-swap capability
(i.e. shutdown the machine to change a drive), then save yourself $75
and go with 2 3114 cards.
That sounds like it would do all I need. I currently have the 3114s'
little sister in there:
pci bus 0x0000 cardnum 0x08 function 0x00: vendor 0x1095 device 0x3112
Silicon Image, Inc. SiI 3112 [SATALink/SATARaid] Serial ATA
Controller
And had not noticed any particular sloth.. but then I've never been
on a seriously tweaked out hard core machine... so it may be really
slow for all I know.
Do you think it would be a problem having a second sata card in a PCI
slot? That would be 8 sata ports in all, since the A-open AK86
motherboard has 2 built in. Or should I swap out the 2prt for the 4
prt. I really only need 2 more prts currently, but would be nice to
have a couple still open for the future.
Your PCI bus bandwidth is shared, so it doesn't matter if you use 3 x
2port cards, or 2 x 4port cards (or, in your case, 1x2port + 1x4port).
Performance is going to be virtually identical.
Erik T. writes:
The Supermicro is better in that it takes up a single slot, uses
SATA2, and does support hotswap very well, but once again, don't even
think about using SSD, as the PCI bus gets overwhelmed well before you
notice any performance increase.
Well that would solve the `for future use' issue.
What do you mean it takes up a single slot? Don't all pci cards do
that?
I was referring to using 1 SuperMicro card instead of 2 3114-cards.
They're all just single-slot cards.
A Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 card, which is a 64-bit/100Mhz PCI-X card
(but will fit and run just fine in a 32-bit PCI slot). it has 8
SATA-2
Near as I can tell from the A-Open AK86 manual, the pci slots are
spec'ed at 32 bit with 33 Mhz clock speed and throughput rate of 133
MB.
So does that mean the higher speed of AOC-SAT2-MV8 card would not be
available?
I'm not very knowledgeable about the various PCI+* cards available.
Does the contact portion of the AOC-SAT2-MV8 card look quite different
from old style PCI but just doesn't use all the contacts in the female
receptacle? Or does the contact portion look the same as old
style pci.
That right - PCI is a fully backwards compatible standard. The contact
portion is correctly keyed so it fully fits in your PCI slot, with some
extra portion hanging over the back side - don't worry about it, that's
correct usage. One thing to note: your motherboard uses 5V PCI slots
(note the small notch in each PCI slots towards the front of the MB).
The 3114 and AOC cards are both "universal" PCI cards, in that they will
work in both a 5v and a 3.3V slot, but be careful - many other PCI cards
are 3.3V (the newer standard). They have a notch in the slot towards
the back of the MB.
Take a look here:
http://www.thgtr.com/motherboard/20040308/images/pcis.gif
So, yes, given your motherboard, any card which you plug into it will
run at 33Mhz, transferring data 32-bits wide. So the SuperMicro's extra
bandwidth is wasted.
------- --------- ---=--- --------- --------
Ethan wrote:
I have a number of SiI 3114 cards, and they are decent, basic cards. I had
to update their firmware to ide version instead of raid version to get them
working with opensolaris, which was a bit of a pain, but no problems since
then.
[...] More excellent input snipped (Thank you)
I'm not sure I follow what you are talking about there. I'm using the
2 prt version of that card, and didn't do any updating or whatever.
It just worked. I do remember fussing a bit getting the drives to show
up, but as I recall (And its been long enough ago that recollections
could be badly skewed) that was a bios setting.
Many of the 3114 cards come with the "RAID" bios. You want to get rid
of this, and flash to the "IDE" firmware (available from SiliconImage's
web site). All 3114 cards can take either bios, so it's not something
you have to be careful about when buying the actual card. Most of the
2-port cards didn't have this issue.
--
Erik Trimble
Java System Support
Mailstop: usca22-123
Phone: x17195
Santa Clara, CA
Timezone: US/Pacific (GMT-0800)
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