On 01/29/2015 06:23 PM, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
There are lots of choices where the info in directed at Windows users, but precious info available if you want to be sure the card will work on Linux.From Amazon, i tried the HighPoint 640L because I know someone who had agood experience. Mine was not so much. I've tried two of the cards but got connected to my drives only briefly once. I have no idea why. Now I'm looking for a solution that will let me connect to my 4TB SATA-3 drives internally, without paying more for it than I paid for the mainboard. Details: - running Xubuntui 14.04 - I have PCIe x1 and x16 slots available - I even have an old PCI slot available, but it may be too slow. - using mdadm, I have no interest in RAID capabilities, just JBOD. - The drives are internal, it would be awkward to set them up otherwise. - I need to connect 2 drives, may want 2 more later, but it can wait. - Drives are 4TB SATA 3 with GPT partitions - I can set the mainboard to use AHCI or IDE compatibility - there is not trace of Windows, so it needs to be configurable with just Linux.
The key is getting a card that has chip(s) that are well supported by Linux. Deducing what chips are on a given card, and whether or not they are supported by Linux, for any given piece of hardware is something that I've yet to have much success with.
So, I asked a similar question in July 2013:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2013/07/msg00310.html
Basically, there were two choices:
1. 2 @ SATA2 host bus adapter ($20).
2. 4 @ SAS/SATA3 RAID controller ($200).
I ended up going with the first option -- Syba SD-SA2PEX-2IR:
http://www.sybausa.com/productInfo.php?iid=536
I'm not using it now, but don't recall any problems with Debian
GNU/Linux, Windows XP, and the various free DOS versions used with
Norton Ghost and hard drive manufacturer bootable diagnostic discs.
I prefer PCIe x1 over PCI because PCIe should have faster access to the CPU/ chipset/ memory and because newer ATX/ microATX motherboards usually have at least one PCIe x1 slot; some don't even have PCI.
As for SATA 1/2/3 speed differences on my SOHO network with LUKS encrypted drives, the bottleneck is usually the CPU (non-AES-NI) or the drive itself. At one point, I had a ZFS on Linux mirror on two 3 TB Seagate ST3000DM001's with LUKS on an Intel DQ67SW motherboard and Core i7-2600S processor, with one drive on a motherboard SATA3 port and the other on a motherboard SATA2 port. I recall that the drive on the SATA2 port had higher busy time than the SATA3 port, but the bottleneck was seeks.
HTH, David