Re: add-in IDE and/or SATA card recommendations

Ed Heron wrote:
>   So, I've got this Dell PowerEdge 2500 with SCSI hardware RAID and I don't 
> have any interest in putting SCSI drives in it.  It doesn't have standard 
> IDE or SATA interfaces, so I'm looking for some recommendations on some 
> relatively inexpensive IDE and SATA cards that Linux likes.
> 
>   I've got a couple of IDE drives from other systems that I'd like to get 
> some more use out of.
> 
>   I'd like to add a couple of SATA drives because I'll be looking at using 
> this machine as a media server.  (MythTV and similar).
> 
>   The case has lots of drive bays and once I take out the SCSI backplane, 
> there is access to the drives for power and data cable connection.
> 
>   On a side note...  Anybody need any (3) ST318406LC drives?  Ultra3 SCSI 
> 10K 18GB
> 
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Unless you need hardware raid, I strongly recommend
Supermicro 8-Port SATA Card - (DAC-SATA-MV8) see
http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/DAC-SATA-MV8.cfm
for details. I got a "OEM" version maybe 6 months ago for ~$100 that 
came with normal and low profile brackets, and 8 high-quality cables. 
These are the cards you often find in Supermicro NAS boxes, very high 
quality, great linux support, never had trouble booting off them (even 
with very old bios).

It is PCI-X 64-bit 133Mhz (1064MB/s ~= x4 PCI-e throughput).
I don't know offhand if Supermicro makes a PCI-e variant. It has only 
been in the last 6-12 months that we've been getting servers machines 
that have PCI-e slots and not PCI-X slots.

If you're going over 4 drives, you definitely want something faster than 
32-bit/33Mhz PCI (in the long term if not now).
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