sata controller
 

will soon need more sata ports than available on my motherboard. i used to use a promise controller. now i see "sata raid" cards. i dont want raid, at all. basically just a card that i can hook extra drives up to.

some of the "sata raid" cards are a ridiculous price too. something reliable but n the lower end of the price scale.

thx for any info

rob123

Dell PERC 5/i

I'm guessing something like these would be sufficient if you just want more ports without RAID:
Newegg.ca - HighPoint Rocket 640L PCI-Express 2.0 x4 Low Profile SATA III (6.0Gb/s) RAID Controller Card (4 SATA)
Newegg.ca - HighPoint RocketRAID 2680 SGL PCI-Express x4 Low Profile SATA / SAS RAID Controller Card (8 SATA via 2 miniSAS cables)

so even though both of those advertise their raid capabilities, i can use them as extra sata ports for my motherboard and not use the raid at all?

thx

rob123

so the 'JBOD' specification for RAID cards isn't necessary?

By default they'll just show as single drives. Only becomes RAID if you setup an array.

No, unless you want to group all your drives into a massive chunk of space. No point of doing this at the card level anyways since you can do it within Windows (dynamic disks).

oh....apparently i totally misunderstood what JBOD meant. I always thought JBOD was equivalent to plugging into the motherboard; each drive gets its own letter, partitions notwithstanding.

so i JBOD a bunch of disks, it'll appear as a single huge drive and when i write to it, the data gets randomly stored to one of the disks?

Correct. So let's say you have 4x 1TB drives in JBOD. It would show as a single 4TB drive in Windows. You have no idea where your data resides.

JBOD (just a bunch of disks) is exactly that - each disk is independent. There is no collective property or dependence. Each behaves as a separate drive and no special software is required.


For example in JBOD mode, disk1, disk2, disk3 disk4 are seen as E:, F: G:, H:



Where all the physical disks are concatenated into a single "disk", is properly known as disk spanning (sometimes a BIG disk) but is not JBOD. This needs to be implemented in either controller firmware or OS software or a combination of both.


For example in SPAN mode disk1, disk2, disk3, disk4 are seen as one large E:

Hmm I've always been under the impression that when a RAID controller says it has JBOD it means that it combines all the drives into a single volume.

Even a quick Google yields both explanations from varying sites. Definitely some misinformation going on.