Time for me to add some more sata ports to my opensolaris build. I’ve been using the SI 3114 PCI cards (4x sata) up until now without any issue, but they are limited by the bandwidth on the PCI slot. Time to upgrade and boost my performance.
At the moment i’m looking at grabbing one of these UIO cards;
http://www.supermicro.com/products/accessories/addon/AOC-USAS-L8i.cfm
From what iv’e been reading these cards will work fine in a PCI-e slot (8x / 16x) after a bit of modding and display the drives straight to opensolaris without any additional drivers etc. (same chipset used in various sun servers)
The backplate on a UIO card is essentially on backwards, when you remove the backplate and put the card into the PCI-e slot all the components will appear on the other side to normal. It is possible if you have a spare PCI-e backplate to attach to this card (just unscrew the current backplate and replace).
And the required mini SAS to SATA cables from extreme deal;
http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.18023
Done.
Updated : 02/09/2009
Put this card in and bingo no problems. Had to export and re-import the zpool as it had problems with the drives being on a different controller? (hadn’t seen that before), but after that everything was working very well as expected. Cool!