Hi there,

I plan to expand my old fileserver running latest stable Debian (sarge ?) kernel 2.4
with some SATA drives which are nowadays really cheap. The question is
if it's possible to add multiple PCI SATA controllers to one PC, without some hardware conflicts etc.
And if linux could recognize them well with ofcourse propper drives functionality.
I plan to use cheap Speed Dragon controllers www-speeddragon-com /en/product/43/02/05/index.html
for 4 drives each in at least double configuration (2 PCI boards).
And probably to setup Software raid in linux over them.
The chipset used in these controllers is SIL3114.
Is that possible ?

Can anyone advice some other possibilities, own experience ?
thank's a lot.

bye Dagy

If drivers exist for those controllers, I don't see why not. I had the onboard controllers act up on me and added two ide controllers. Add to that the unused ide raid controller (which was really software raid and no drivers) and I didn't have a problem. Controllers are cheaper than drives, so I don't think you need to get to stingy. You can also check the HCL on this site. Pick a controller from the list to guarantee that you don't have problems.

For a file server, I would recommend scsci rather than sata. Especially if you plan to use raid. Even more so with raid-5. I know they are more expensive, but they will perform better. I also read that for raid arrays, scsi drives will have a lower failure rate, even though the mechanisms are identical. I don't know if that is true, but it might have something to do with how they are worked in a raid array.

I hope Drivers exists. I've found something that there are modules for SIL3114 in debian. I of course don't plan to use
"built in" raid crap on these cheap controllers. If so I'll use linux software raid.
I also don't plan to use SCSI. That's more than 10 times expensive than SATA solution. And I definitely don't need performance.
I plan to store everything on drives online instead of burning DVDs ( nowadays it's cheaper than any offline media ). So I need
the cheapest storage sollution for about 1-2TB. And SATA drives with multiple $20 controllers seems to make it well !

What else have I found as a problem is that my old motherboard has only PCI revision 2.1 slots. and these controllers are PCI 2.2
Will that work ?

S-ATA drives are cheap for a reason - they're cheap.
They seem particularly susceptible to voltage variations and heat.

I recently lost 4 drives - 3 were S-ATA. The guy at my local shop said he was seeing a lot more returns/failures in S-ATA as against similar sized P-ATA (i.e. EIDE).

Choose wisely - especially if you plan to run without taking backups.

Well I've lost also few drives because of overheat. Now I'm very careful about heating.
Anyway I don't think SATA and PATA drives are different in construction. The price is similar
and SATA is only a different interface between controller and drive.