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I'm increasing storage on a system and have run out of SATA ports. Can anyone recommend a 8 port SATA card (No RAID) which supports up to 2TB hard drives. Thank you.

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why wouldn't you want a RAID controller? If are running software raid and are going to put a card in, you might as well put in a hardware RAID card. – Zypher♦ Mar 18 '11 at 23:27
Would this be ESATA? or is this an internal SATA (HDD mounted inside the PC case)? – Campo Mar 19 '11 at 0:24
@Zypher, he might be looking to build a cheap ZFS pool, in which case the extra expense of a RAID controller would be wasted. However, the best performance usually comes from good SAS HBAs, the type that typically integrate RAID. – Chris S♦ Mar 19 '11 at 1:55
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Closing as off-topic, as we don't do shopping recommendations. – Mark Henderson♦ Mar 22 '11 at 1:24
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closed as off topic by John Gardeniers, Ben Pilbrow, DJ Pon3, Sam♦, Mark Henderson♦ Mar 22 '11 at 1:23

Questions on Server Fault are expected to generally relate to servers, networking, or desktop infrastructure, within the scope defined in the faq.

4 Answers

up vote 0 down vote accepted

For home use I use IBM BR10i cards
each has 2 sff multiports (8 sas devices per card (4 per port))
3 cards in the file server for 24 disks in the storage array
plus 2 system disks off the on board controllers

IIRC they have an lsi chipset

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up vote 2 down vote

Port multipliers might be what you're searching for: serialata.org. And the following link is no ad - just old school tech FYI: Backblaze

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up vote 1 down vote

See: ZFS SAS/SATA controller recommendations

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up vote 0 down vote

This may not be exactly what you need but here is the list from a research I did for my recent project:

  • LSI SAS 9211-8i
  • LSI SAS 9210-8i
  • LSI SAS 3081E-R
  • LSI SAS 3080X-R
  • Adaptec 2805

They all have an entry level RAID controller but is is an inexpensive kind. See if it helps.

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