Per Jessen wrote:
Before I go and build the prototype, I was just wondering if anyone's had any experience with running so many SATA drives on a single mainboard?
One concern I have is scalability - I easily picture a box with 4 or 6 drives delivering very good I/O rates, but I can't help wondering if there is some ceiling somewhere that I'm going to hit if I just add more and more drives. There is of course a plain hardware/physical limit, but 16 drives is still achieveable. In selecting the controller(s), I'm looking at price per SATA port, and I only need RAID0, but I have also been wondering about throughput, e.g. is there any reason to think that a 4-port card might perform better than an 8-port?
The good news is that I do have a server with 16 SATA disks - well 17 actually - and it does what I need. The bad news is that I'm not sure how much that helps you :) The machine is 5 years old so probably doesn't help your design decisions. It has a dual-xeon Tyan motherboard with an on board SATA controller - the 160 GB system disk is connected to that. It also has 2 off 3ware 9600 controllers, each with 8 250 GB disks. It has 2 GB memory and 4 off 1 Gb NICs (two on motherboard, two plugin). It basically just acts as an NFS server. There have been various disk failures over the years and we just had a processor fail. Cheers, Dave -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org