# Looking for an inexpensive 4-port SATA controller



## atomicplayboy (Jan 20, 2010)

I just learned that the SATA ports on my nforce4 motherboard are AHCI non-compliant and that it's not very likely that NCQ will ever be supported on them, so I'm looking for something as a replacement. My options are using either the PCI-e x4 slot, or a regular PCI slot. I found a Syba card with 4 ports that uses the sil3124 chipset, which should be supported by the siis driver, but I'm wary of some of the reviews it's gotten on Newegg, not to mention it's a PCI-e x1 interface. My questions are thus:

1) Does anyone know of a well-supported (in FreeBSD) PCI-e x4 card with 4 internal SATA ports that's not to pricey?

2) There seem to be plenty of PCI cards that would fit the bill; what kind of a performance hit should I expect with one of these cards?


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## mav@ (Jan 20, 2010)

SiI3124 is actually PCI-X 64/133 chip. But several vendors like Syba and Addonics provide boards with built-in PCIe bridge. They exist in both PCIe x1 and x8 variants. PCIe x1 variant gives about 200MB/s of total bandwidth, PCI-X and PCIe x8 variants - about 1GB/s. PCI-X variant could be inserted into regular PCI bus, but performance will degrade much there.


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## mav@ (Jan 20, 2010)

For regular PCI upper limit is 133MB/s, so PCIe x1 would still be faster. Even slowest PCIe x1 controllers I've seen, gave about 150MB/s.


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## SirDice (Jan 20, 2010)

I'm looking at a Highpoint RocketRaid 2310. It's a PCIe x4 card and should be supported. Unfortunately all controller cards with 4 or more SATA ports all seem to have hardware raid. I don't need that. Still looking for a 4 port card without raid.


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## Matty (Jan 20, 2010)

SirDice said:
			
		

> I'm looking at a Highpoint RocketRaid 2310. It's a PCIe x4 card and should be supported. Unfortunately all controller cards with 4 or more SATA ports all seem to have hardware raid. I don't need that. Still looking for a 4 port card without raid.



the rocketraid isn't a hardware raidcontroller


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## SirDice (Jan 20, 2010)

Matty said:
			
		

> the rocketraid isn't a hardware raidcontroller



It is.

http://www.highpoint-tech.com/usa/rr2310.htm


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## phoenix (Jan 20, 2010)

Don't know about 4-port cards, but there are quite a few 8-port cards out there without RAID, or with minimal RAID.  They're in the $200-$400 CDN range.

I posted a list of them in one of the ZFS threads on here.


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## Matty (Jan 20, 2010)

SirDice said:
			
		

> It is.
> 
> http://www.highpoint-tech.com/usa/rr2310.htm



You got raid5 on most motherboards but that is not real hardwareraid. these cards dont have a cpu on board.

It's basically the same kind of raid you would get when using the onboard raid function of your motherboard


http://www.highpoint-tech.com/usa/series_3500.htm
these are real hardware raid controllers with Intel IOP341 (800MHz chips on them


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## SirDice (Jan 20, 2010)

Right, strictly speaking it's firmware or fake raid. I refer to hardware raid as a controller that does raid regardless of the OS that's loaded. As opposed to software raid (like vinum and raidz) that is done by the OS. I don't need hardware/fake/whatever as I will be using raidz :e


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## atomicplayboy (Jan 21, 2010)

SirDice said:
			
		

> I'm looking at a Highpoint RocketRaid 2310. It's a PCIe x4 card and should be supported. Unfortunately all controller cards with 4 or more SATA ports all seem to have hardware raid. I don't need that. Still looking for a 4 port card without raid.



I was looking at that one, though I wasn't sure if it would be supported under the new ATA CAM integration. It looks to be a Marvel 8SSX7042 chipset.

I'm trying out a 2 port SiI3132, PCI-e x1 based card, and my ASUS a8n32-sli mobo has a single SiI3132 port (meant for some sort of raid setup, but I've got it set to SATA2 mode) on it, which is sufficient for the HDDs I have currently. The HDD I have hooked up to the mobo port is an early SATA model, so I'm not surprised I'm seeing this:


```
ada0 at siisch1 bus 0 scbus1 target 0 lun 0
ada0: <ST3250823AS 3.03> ATA-7 SATA 1.x device
ada0: 150.000MB/s transfers (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO size 8192bytes)
ada0: Command Queueing enabled
ada0: 238475MB (488397168 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
```

Though I'm nearly sure that the two HDDs I have hooked up to the PCI-e card are supposed to support the full 300MB/s transfer rate...


```
ada1 at siisch2 bus 0 scbus4 target 0 lun 0
ada1: <ST3300631AS 3.04> ATA-7 SATA 1.x device
ada1: [color=red]150.000MB/s transfers[/color] (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO size 8192bytes)
ada1: Command Queueing enabled
ada1: 286168MB (586072368 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
ada2 at siisch3 bus 0 scbus5 target 0 lun 0
ada2: <ST3300631AS 3.04> ATA-7 SATA 1.x device
ada2: [color=red]150.000MB/s transfers[/color] (SATA 1.x, UDMA6, PIO size 8192bytes)
ada2: Command Queueing enabled
ada2: 286168MB (586072368 512 byte sectors: 16H 63S/T 16383C)
```

NCQ seems to be working on all three:


```
xxx@xxx:~>$ camcontrol tags ada0          
(pass0:siisch1:0:0:0): device openings: 31
xxx@xxx:~>$ camcontrol tags ada1
(pass3:siisch2:0:0:0): device openings: 31
xxx@xxx:~>$ camcontrol tags ada2
(pass4:siisch3:0:0:0): device openings: 31
```

Any idea why I'm seeing the slower transfer rates?


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## atomicplayboy (Jan 21, 2010)

After doing some research on the part numbers, I found that all three of my HDDs are actually part of the 7200.8 family which, unfortunately, only go up to 150 in SATA speeds.

That aside, does everything else look up to par?


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## mav@ (Jan 21, 2010)

Nobody have seen yet SiI3132 giving more then 150MB/s of bandwidth (in each direction, there is duplex) via it's PCIe x1. So it's not very fast. But with these disks you won't probably reach this limitation. Same time random I/O and NCQ working fine there. So if you need 4 ports, two such controllers could be a choice.


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## mav@ (Jan 21, 2010)

To be complete:
PCIe x1 theoretical limit - 250MB/s,
best I've seen - 200MB/s (Syba SiI3124 with PCIe x1 bridge),
more common values - 170-180MB/s.

So whether 150MB/s is worse then average, it is not very bad.


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## SirDice (Jan 21, 2010)

atomicplayboy said:
			
		

> I was looking at that one, though I wasn't sure if it would be supported under the new ATA CAM integration. It looks to be a Marvel 8SSX7042 chipset.


Accourding to the hptrr(4) man page it should be supported. It does seem to use a binary blob though but I don't have a problem with that (I use the nvidia driver too).


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## atomicplayboy (Jan 22, 2010)

mav@ said:
			
		

> Nobody have seen yet SiI3132 giving more then 150MB/s of bandwidth (in each direction, there is duplex) via it's PCIe x1. So it's not very fast. But with these disks you won't probably reach this limitation. Same time random I/O and NCQ working fine there. So if you need 4 ports, two such controllers could be a choice.



It would have been nice to see what kind of max bandwidth I could get out of this controller, but with no plans to upgrade the disks anytime soon, I suppose this setup will do for now. Thanks for the help, everyone. And thanks, Mav, for all of your hard work on the ATA CAM integration.


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## astounding (Jan 28, 2010)

*SFF-8087 mini-SAS versions?*

Any inexpensive (i.e. < $40 per SATA II/SAS port) PCIe (preferably > x1) controllers out there with SFF-8087 internal mini-SAS connectors?  Makes cabling so much easier with a single card connection fanning out to 4 drives...

Wondering,
Aaron out...


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## Matty (Jan 29, 2010)

astounding said:
			
		

> Any inexpensive (i.e. < $40 per SATA II/SAS port) PCIe (preferably > x1) controllers out there with SFF-8087 internal mini-SAS connectors?  Makes cabling so much easier with a single card connection fanning out to 4 drives...
> 
> Wondering,
> Aaron out...



check these out:
ARC-1300-4i
http://www.areca.com.tw/products/sasnoneraid.htm
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151059R
there about 110$ which makes them not really cheap but I think they are great value for money. Still waiting on the fb driver tho.


> BSD/FreeBSD (will be available at the end of Q1 2010 for the 3Gb/s Host Adaptor and the new 6Gb/s Host Adapter)


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## astounding (May 3, 2010)

*Inexpensive SATA controllers?*

I gave up on inexpensive mini-SAS connectors and went with a plain-vanilla 4-port SATA-II PCI Express x4 card using the "Marvell 88SX7042" chipset, paying around $20-$25 per port.

Are there any denser SATA controller cards out there, or better deals?  I'm looking for reliable but cheap.  I don't need RAID, since ZFS is doing my RAID.  While I'd love mini-SAS connectors, I'll settle for simple SATA connectors.

Aaron out.


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## phoenix (May 3, 2010)

Define "cheap".  

Search the forums.  I listed off a bunch of 8-port PCIe SATA controllers in a ZFS thread, as alternatives to full-function RAID controllers.  They're in the $ 200-400 CDN range on newegg.ca/cdw.ca/ncix.com


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## knarf (May 4, 2010)

I've just ordered a Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 for EUR 103,77. This is a 8-port PCI-X card (up to 1066 MByte/s in theory).

I plan to replace my 3ware 9550SX-8LP or at least my 8506-4LP (both PCI-X hardware RAID controllers running SINGLE DISKs and zfs in a Supermicro P8SCT and X8SAX). I no longer want to pay for features I don't use, because these features still require attention (JBOD or SINGLE DISK? Write cache on or off? Where do I get a working 3dmd2 for FreeBSD 8?).

And there are still a lot of people out there who pay a lot of money for a used full featured hardware RAID card, because they have no idea about FreeBSD and zfs. 

The PCIe cards I've seen so far are either much more expensive or just PCIe 1x (up to 500 MB/s) or both.

But this thread is about 4-port controllers. I don't think it's a good idea to spend money on a PCIe 1x 4-port SATA controller. I think OP should be able to find a recent motherboard with AHCI compliant SATA-II ports, and he should be able to get 6 of them (instead of 4) for a price that is not too far away from the price of the controller. The benefits of this upgrade could be huge.


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## phoenix (May 4, 2010)

knarf said:
			
		

> Where do I get a working 3dmd2 for FreeBSD 8?).



3dm2 2.04 works just fine on 64-bit FreeBSD 8-STABLE (from March).  You have to install it from the 9.5.3 CD, and not from the ports tree.


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## knarf (May 4, 2010)

phoenix said:
			
		

> 3dm2 2.04 works just fine on 64-bit FreeBSD 8-STABLE (from March).  You have to install it from the 9.5.3 CD, and not from the ports tree.



I know. I use 3dm-2.04.00.035_1,1 from the ports and it works fine. I had a discussion with the maintainer on how to fix this problem, but I had no success.

BTW: 3dmd2 from 3DM2_CLI-FreeBSD-10.1.zip does not work with FreeBSD 8, too.


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