Slashdot linked to a tweakers.net SATA comparison. These are higher priced and higher performance cards, but it's good to know what's out there and available. Man, technology has come a long way... their highest recommended card, the Areca ARC-1120, has it's own onboard http server to let you monitor your hard drives.... wow. This card also supports RAID6 (RAID5 + another parity drive and the ability to withstand two simultanious drive failures if I read it right). Something to think about for the next incarnation of the server. Of course, I think that the $700 US cost for this might make it a bit price prohibitive for me :)
If you don't think this should be a problem, feel free to contibute via the paypal link though!
Posted by Arcterex at March 08, 2005 09:47 AM
There's SATA based SAN's too...
This one from Sun supports 12 x 250 GB SATA drives, 12 hosts, all connected via 1.5 Gbps FiberChannel. yummy.
http://www.sun.com/storage/workgroup/3000/3500/3511/index.xml
I fired them an email. You can pick up the card direct from them for $669 + $30 shipping to Canada. So it'd be $699 + tax shipped + duty. Very nice looking card though. I'm considering it for my lossless audio archive. You could start with 3x400GB drives RAID5 and then add more drives as you need more room. As the price of the 400GB drives fall you could add an extra parity drive and bump it to RAID6. If I only had more disposable income ATM I'd have on already ordered. Doh! :P
