[plug] Cheap Linux-friendly SATA/PCI Controllers

[Craig Foster]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-bounces at plug.org.au [mailto:plug-bounces at plug.org.au] On
> Behalf Of Daniel Pittman
> Sent: Friday, 9 January 2009 9:49 AM
> To: plug at plug.org.au
> Subject: Re: [plug] Cheap Linux-friendly SATA/PCI Controllers
> 
> "Patrick Coleman" <blinken at gmail.com> writes:
> > On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Trevor Phillips
> > <trevor.phillips at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I have a PC at home that's rather short on disk space, but doesn't
> >> have onboard SATA. However, I'd rather buy SATA disk to be more
> >> future-proof. Replacing the whole PC isn't financially viable at
> this
> >> stage. ^_^
> >>
> >> Is there anything in particular to look for in SATA PCI Controllers
> to
> >> ensure decent Linux compatibility, or are they all pretty standard
> and
> >> well supported?
> >
> > I use Silicon Image chipset ones that are fairly well supported and
> > extremely cheap, but mine are getting old - I don't know if there's
> > better alternatives now.
> 
> Not really. :)  Any of the AHCI devices are good, but most of them
seem
> to be built in to the south-bridge or otherwise not shipped on
discrete
> hardware in my experience.
> 
> For the gory details see:
> http://ata.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Hardware%2C_driver_status
> 
> Regards,
>         Daniel


I've had good experiences with Initio SATA PCI RAID controllers both on
Windows and Linux. They're faster than the Sili's (named after the
corruption the older cards used to introduce into RAID mirrors) and they
have more onboard processing than Sili's, Adaptec HostRAID, FastTrack
and ICH8/9/10 RAID controllers.
And they work perfectly as single drives...

Of course I haven't installed one lately as the HP servers (with
hardware RAID) have very nice Linux support. 

Craig F.