hardware for home use large storage

[Dan Langille]

Alexander Motin wrote:
> Steve Polyack wrote:
>> On 2/10/2010 12:02 AM, Dan Langille wrote:
>>> Don't use a port multiplier and this goes away.  I was hoping to avoid
>>> a PM and using something like the Syba PCI Express SATA II 4 x Ports
>>> RAID Controller seems to be the best solution so far.
>>>
>>> http://www.amazon.com/Syba-Express-Ports-Controller-SY-PEX40008/dp/B002R0DZWQ/ref=sr_1_22?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1258452902&sr=1-22
>> Dan, I can personally vouch for these cards under FreeBSD.  We have 3 of
>> them in one system, with almost every port connected to a port
>> multiplier (SiI5xxx PMs).  Using the siis(4) driver on 8.0-RELEASE
>> provides very good performance, and supports both NCQ and FIS-based
>> switching (an essential for decent port-multiplier performance).
>>
>> One thing to consider, however, is that the card is only single-lane
>> PCI-Express.  The bandwidth available is only 2.5Gb/s (~312MB/sec,
>> slightly less than that of the SATA-2 link spec), so if you have 4
>> high-performance drives connected, you may hit a bottleneck at the
>> bus.   I'd be particularly interested if anyone can find any similar
>> Silicon Image SATA controllers with a PCI-E 4x or 8x interface ;)
> 
> Here is SiI3124 based card with built-in PCIe x8 bridge:
> http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/adsa3gpx8-4em.asp
> 
> It is not so cheap, but with 12 disks connected via 4 Port Multipliers
> it can give up to 1GB/s (4x250MB/s) of bandwidth.
> 
> Cheaper PCIe x1 version mentioned above gave me up to 200MB/s, that is
> maximum of what I've seen from PCIe 1.0 x1 controllers. Looking on NCQ
> and FBS support it can be enough for many real-world applications, that
> don't need so high linear speeds, but have many concurrent I/Os.

Is that the URL you meant to post?  "4 Port eSATA PCI-E 8x Controller 
for Mac Pro".  I'd rather use internal connections.