A word of caution. 6 on-board SATA is not always enough. It is often the case
that using all will hit internal bandwidth limits. I find it common for 4 disks
to be handled OK but 5 are too much.

A simple test of 5 concurrent dd's will tell you if all disks are going full speed.
Some time one combination of 5 out of 6 (or 8) on-board sockets will perform better
than other and it is worth checking.

Eyal

Goswin von Brederlow wrote:

Dexter Filmore [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

I want to upgrade server hardware here, currently I have 5 Samsungs (sATA II) 
sitting on the onboard controller of an Asus K8N-E Socket754 board.
I guess the controller chips are both connected via PCI hence performance 
isn't really hot.

Basically I need either a board with at least 6x sATA-II attached via PCIe or 
a "dumb" PCIe 4x or 8x controller card.

Any recommendations?

Dex

Anything that is not pci. PCIe or PCI-X will both be way
faster. Server boards with 6x SATA-II onboard are hard to miss. And
any cheap PCIe/PCI-X controler will probably do.

One important thing to think about is hotplug support. Do you need it
or not?

Look for a board and then check out http://linux-ata.org/ for support.

MfG
        Goswin

-- 
Eyal Lebedinsky	(eyal@eyal.emu.id.au)