Need a Sata controller card reccomendation - Page 2

Yes, fiber channel shipment has peaked. For the traditional structured data storage, HP still paid a huge price last year for 3PAR Those boxes are only using 1 or 2 GE externally but very fast internally. IBM, Hitachi Data System, Oracle (Sun Micro) are in this group. They typically use some variety of hardware accelerated VM. Copper backplanes are giving way to infiniband and point-to-point optical interconnect. Dell opened an operation here recently probably to boost sever R&D.

White box architecture is only for the very large, non-structured data oriented data centers so far. But that is where the real growth will be. They use copper and optical 10G, 40G ethernet in place of backplanes to connect all the PC servers. Copper 10G for within rack (north-south) and optical 10G/40G for rack to cluster switch (east-west) connections. Google tries to place all the applications a particular user uses in the same server, to give the "blink of an eye" (500mSec) response.

These cheap SATA RAID cards are not used in warehouse scale computers" because they are still too expensive. But they are used in general corporate, commercial servers.

From here to San Francisco is virtually a glass highway for internet. Data centers are dotted along the way. Even www.usps.com was hosted here for a few years. The city of Santa Clara tried to attract data centers with city power grid. So most of the larger ones are dual powered.
Edited by dksc318 - 9/8/12 at 4:20pm

UnRAID is a Linux-based server program. I've never had a drive disappear from my array in the five plus years it's been in service and it runs 24/7. Lots of folks in the unRAID forums swear by these controllers. They simply work and they work well.

I'm aware of what unraid is and what it runs on. Your experience doesn't mean that those cards have been problem free for everyone. The dropout issues with the mvsas drivers have for the most part gone away with the 3.x kernels, but there have been performance issues with the mvsas drivers in as recently as July. Some of these problems can even be found on the unraid forums.
Edited by robnix - 9/9/12 at 11:04am

No consumer product is problem-free. Look in any forum about consumer electronics and it's full of people complaining about problems. The discussion here seems to have migrated towards corporate networks and social networking systems rather than a simple home network. The Supermicro controllers appear to be well suited for this type of setup where you only have a handful of users. All I'm saying is that I've been using them for years and have no complaints. Most people aren't looking for the level of performance you're referring to. They mostly just want to be able to stream HD video with no problems. I doubt that most home networks would tax these cards to the limit.

Does anyone know anything about the IBM 44E8796 controller? I ran across it while researching some of the cards listed in this thread. I did a search for the IBM M1015 and this turned up. It's a 12-port SAS/SATA PCI-e controller. I'm trying to find out if it works with 3TB drives and has Linux support. I've seen this as low as $72.

It's an SAS expander card, not a controller like the M1015.