SATA Multipliers

[jwhitt]

Im in the process of piecing together a new storage system for my house, houses mostly media files. Currently my setup is Open Filer with a iscsi lun's mapped to a server 2008 host, and to a white-box esxi host for testing. RAID is handled at the SW layer using 6 1TB Seagate drives. What im looking at building would be a COTS based system probably using AMD hardware.

i have been looking at these to solve the issues with the limited amount of on board SATA ports http://www.addonics.com/products/host_c ... d5sapm.asp

Does anyone have any experience using these or something similar to expand on-board SATA ports?

I was trying to stay with the Software RAID solution to A) cut costs, and B) reduce opportunities for failure of the controller. its alot easier to rebuild off of a software raid in my opinion. I haven't noticed any real performance drawbacks as my current solution is a dual core Intel, and 4GB or ram (thats the bottleneck in large transfers for me as im using fileio for iscsi)

However if the SATA multipliers are going to be more hassle/less performance than their worth as i will be needing 3 of these to handle 15 drives going to 3 onboard SATA ports, then ill get a sas card.

any thoughts?

Jason

 

[corndog]

Hi Jason,

Port Multipliers can be a mixed bag of success and failure. One of the oldest solutions to support it is the venerable sil3132 SATA chip. It works ok under Linux and Windows (although speed is mediocre) but doesn't support Multipliers at all under Solaris (if you're itching to try ZFS one day)

The new motherboards with the Intel ICH10 SATA device have lots of support - Linux, Windows, and Solaris (not sure about FreeBSD yet - for those into FreeNAS) These are generally motherboards that support the Core i5 or i7 chips with the LGA1156 socket.

However, sometimes you get a motherboard that has all of the internal SATA ports on the ICH10 chip, but the eSATA ports on the back panel are not. Instead they are on a Realtek or JMicron SATA controller, and don't support Multipliers at all.

So be careful about the details of the mainboard you are getting.

... and that's just comments on SATA controllers - not on the multiplier devices themselves...