PCI Sata cards and other HDD Questions.

[kernow]

Hello

My fileserver is running out of space, its an old dual p3 800e BX440 setup, I was looking at a couple of 500GB drives (mirrored nightly via rsync), the same as I have it set up now. I am pretty sure its too old to support LBA48 however and IDE drives are pretty expensive compared to their SATA counterparts. Pretty sure the BIOS is going to limit it to 128GB if I stick a couple of 500's in there, it has 160's at present and they are fine obviously.

Then I thought about a PCI SATA card, is it worth bothering with normal PCI and a slower machine? If it would let me plug a couple of 1TB drives in there and use them as I am now (I imagine they'd be presented as /dev/sdX in linux so that wouldn't be an issue). But would it sort out the LBA48 issue also?

I have a P4 1.8 with mobo I guess I could put in there instead, but I'm not a real P4 fan and its not really an upgrade as such. The things been running fine for years so I'd like to keep it that way. USB2 would be nice on it though, hmm. Might have to get a PCI card for that if I can find one.

So yeah, would the PCI sata adaptor get around the lack of LBA48 support or not? I might be limited to < 500GB drives on this thing. It was 500 that used LBA48 first right? or 320?

Cheers.

[Dirty Sanchez]

Skip the whole thing an pick up a cheap base unit from AVForums for less than ?100

[speedlolita]

Dual P3 is pretty epeen though dude.

Surely a card that can accomodate more than the motherboard would work fine? It'll be working through the PCI port directly I assume and won't have any contact with the limits that the board should impose.

[briareos_kerensky]

The LBA48 limit won't be a motherboard issue but a controller issue; taking a look at the manufacturer's website for detailed information, updated drivers or a new firmware should clear this problem for you.

Installing a PCI controller is no problem, though the SATA bandwidth will be limited by the PCI bus and probably there aren't any non-express PCI controllers capable of SATA3 (but I don't really know), so it's not necessary to go for the fastest drive available.

Have you considered a NAS?

[kernow]

Not really considered a NAS as its my main linux box I use for apache, nfs, and a load of other services. Performance really isn't an issue. I'm thinking a pci sata card might be the way to go eventually.

Hmm, I thought the bios had to support it also to be honest. So a pci sata card wouldn't have the problem at least? Neither would be boot drives either.

[smouty]

I bought a generic Sil 3114 4 port card on ebay which has been running continuously for the past few years. It supports RAID5 but I use Linux software RAID on 4x 750Gb drives.
It costs about &#163;15 and is the same price now. It did need a firmware update to support larger sized drives though.
The network is still the bottleneck even at gigabit so performance isn't an issue for file serving.

[kernow]

Indeed, thanks for the info, I might just go that route in the end then, it'd clear up a bit of space removing those horrible IDE cables also. I'm scared of setting up RAID so I'll use my nightly cron rsync job still probably

[speedlolita]

Set up a RAID10 array..

[kernow]

Never! It seems too complex for something I can do with one line of script. cough.

[smouty]

Linux RAID is pretty nice if a bit slower than the hardware based cards.
I moved this SATA card and RAID5 array from a PIII to a PIV mobo without issue and also had a disk drop out when I knocked the power cable.
MDADM is pretty powerful and I had the array rebuilding after a few mins of sweating even though the data was fully accessible with 1 drive in a defunct state.
Software RAID was preferable for me to avoid being locked to hardware.