David,
I'm looking for recommendations on a eSATA PCI card (old style PCI, not
PCI-E or PCI-X).
How many ports you looking for? What RAID support do you want?
I use a card from Silicon Image which has one external eSATA II and three
internal SATA II (the Sil 3124), but they also have a version with four
eSATA instead. Each port handles a port multiplier; the ones I use accept 5
drives each. That means you can attach up to 20 SATA II drives if you use
multipliers on every port. Drives can optionally be configured with RAID 0,
1, 5, 6, or 10 (as I recall -- I use RAID 5). Drives can be hot swapped.
I have five 500GB drives in a RAID5 configuration in an external tower, all
one a single eSATA port using a port multiplier. I have another four 500GB
drives on a port multiplier in internal drive bays, also in a RAID5 config.
This gives me about 3.5TB in a RAID5 setup, and I haven't even used half the
drives I could attach to the card.
Obviously, the PCI bus can't deliver the full 3GB/s bandwidth which multiple
SATA II drives could in theory provide. But it works fine for my purposes.
They also have a Windows GUI for configuring drive sets, hot spare drives,
relative priority of rebuilds, current status of drives, etc. I don't know
if they also have a Linux version
Silicon Image has lots of different cards depending on what ports and
features you want. I use the Sil 3124.
Doug
midrange.com
