SCSI Card to Internal 4-Port SATA 3.0 (Linux).

[setha]

Hi,

I believe, with SCSI card, your linux system can write to 4 SATA hard disks at the same time, instead of one hard disk at a time, like onboard SATA. I want to experiment with small server at home soon.

Here are the information that I know.
- My small server at home should support RAID over this SCSI Card.
- This SCSI Card should not be expensive, and it should also can write to four SATA 3.0 hard disks at the same time.
- My small server, which I want to experiment with, would run on ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe with 4 GB of RAM, and AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU Dual Core 2.6 GHz, which I would install Linux on it.
- At this point my PC has one PCI-E X1 and one PCI-Express X16 available.
- What are the differences between expensive SCSI card and affordable one.

I hope you can give me some example of such SCSI card, as well as what other features should be on the card.

Thank you.

 

[R_1]

you mean a RAID card?
SCSI requires SCSI interface drives, SATA and SCSI are not interchangeable.
you can get RAID cards on PCIe that would allow you to run RAID5 or RAID 1+0. that would use all four drives at once.

assuming that you mean RAID, the cheaper cards rely on the system for certain computations and caching, the expensive cards have their own processor dedicated to the task at hand, and they usually have expandable memory, both of these features means that they are faster in almost every metric, the Expensive cards.

 

[Rogue Leader]

You have the name mixed up a bit. SCSI as a term is generally used for an older hardware interface for multiple drives, high speed drives, etc.

However today what you want for what you are doing is a SAS controller card which will have multiple SATA ports. (SAS stands for Serial Attached SCSI). Keep in mind the cheapest one of them I've seen is around $100 and you can't just use normal SATA drives but specific SAS drives with it as well.

This is not going to be a cheap experiment.

THAT SAID....

You don't need SAS to do what you want

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064&cm_re=RAID_controller-_-16-124-064-_-Product

Hook up 4 drives and configure in RAID 1 or RAID 5, it will write to all 4 at the same time. Regular SATA drives.

 

[setha]

I found this information from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/103435, and I want to experiment such card with BTRFS. I thought, while the first hard disk is performing "Seek", the other disks may perform the other tasks.

The card that you gave above would perform the same as on-board SATA correct?

Thank you.

 

[Rogue Leader]

I found this information from https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/103435, and I want to experiment such card with BTRFS. I thought, while the first hard disk is performing "Seek", the other disks may perform the other tasks.

The card that you gave above would perform the same as on-board SATA correct?

Thank you.

That article is ancient. the SCSI interface it is talking about hasn't been used for many years. Look at the speeds, current drives are FAR faster.

If you want that kind of feature set you will need to use SAS drives and a SAS card as I suggested first. It is NOT cheap by any means.

Example:
Card
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101792&cm_re=SAS_card-_-16-101-792-_-Product

Drives
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178290&ignorebbr=1&cm_re=sas_drive-_-22-178-290-_-Product

Mind you this is really an enterprise setup for multiple users to be accessing the drives. Its worthless for home use other than testing it to see how it works.

The RAID controller card I mentioned wouldn't do what you want, forget that idea.