Sata-Controller

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)

This is the perfect controller for adding additional sata drives into opensolaris (well in terms of price, the bandwidth of the PCI slot is the only negative part). The si3114 comes with the default bios that supports various raid configs, but this requires additional drivers to be loaded.

Essentially the “raid” on the card is called fakeraid as it does not actually process any data itself, but hooks into the cpu via a driver and lets your cpu do all the work.