Recommend a sata card please

[stevecross]

Good evening guys. i am in the process of updating my server and am installing whs 2003, due to the fact my board only has 2 sata ports i am thinking of installing a pci sata card. I wondered if anyone had experience of these and could recommend one. It would be nice if it supported some kind of raid.
Any advise

steve

[pski]

Good evening guys. i am in the process of updating my server and am installing whs 2003, due to the fact my board only has 2 sata ports i am thinking of installing a pci sata card. I wondered if anyone had experience of these and could recommend one. It would be nice if it supported some kind of raid.
Any advise

steve

I just got the $19.99 card from BestBuy. It is PCI EXpress 1, which is the "short" connector on the MB next to the video PCI EXpress slot.

So far, so good. I have it hooked to a ThermalTake two-drive toaster that supplies the drive splitter. Since the card has two ports and the toaster supports drives to 2TB, that provides up to 8TB using two toasters. Performance is vastly faster than USB.

I wonder if windows would rebuild a raid-1 drive if you just hot-plugged a new drive?

Mirroring in windows is enabled in CMOS settings on the motherboard and then configured using the disk management plugin. If your MB has eSata, it should have that option. I'm sure you can get boards that do on-controller raid but they aren't going to be $20. This board does support 3GB eSata which is significantly faster than any HDA available (except solid-state drives) so the only small drawback to using it for raid would be the processor overhead, which should not be that much.

P

[riffer]

Not the Promise TX4302. They don't have Windows Vista or 7 drivers!
Great card for XP though.