question Good SATA card?

CougTek

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Any controller card based on the LSI 2108. Visit this page for more informations. I've used the IBM, Dell and HP flavors. All will do what you want and can be found, used, in many refurb computer shops and online stores.
 

Handruin

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Not so fast... :) Can anyone recommend a 4 or 8 port (it seems there is not much difference in price) SATA or SAS card that can do hardware RAID 10 (not soft RAID or Hardware assisted)? PCI-e x1 or x4 preferred, but will settle for x8. Compatible with ESXi 5/5.1 as well.

How about the LSI 9260-8i or Dell Perc H700?
 

CougTek

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They'd be nice, but new, they are $450 ~ $500 in Aus.
I don't know how much you expected to pay for such a controller, but I've found an IBM ServerRAID M5014 at 300AU$ and another ServerRAID 5110 (based on the LSI 2208 - successor of the 2108 ) for ~220$ (plus ~45AU$ for shipping). Unless you are lucky at a local shop, I don't think you'll find much better than those.

The Dell and LSI variants are much more expensive. I've not been able to find one from Fujitsu. There's also one from HP : the H220 (LSI 2208 clone) at 290AU$ plus 48AU$ for the shipping.
 
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Handruin

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They'd be nice, but new, they are $450 ~ $500 in Aus.

I didn't know your budget. I know those are great cards that work reliably with ESXi 5 from first hand experience and met your criteria. :) They're similarly priced in the US as you're seeing. I didn't check eBay etc.
 

LiamC

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Thanks Coug.
Handy, I didn't mean to disparage your post. The fault would be mine for not making myself clear.

And just a thought, would zfs be an alternative to RAID? Especially if I'm only going to create some pools on a FreeNAS box and serve them up to a couple of VM's?
 

Chewy509

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And just a thought, would zfs be an alternative to RAID? Especially if I'm only going to create some pools on a FreeNAS box and serve them up to a couple of VM's?
Absolutely, on provision you have enough RAM on the host. I can't remember what the FreeNAS recommendation, but IIRC it's in the order of 8GB+ of RAM.
 

LiamC

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My reading says that the RoT is 1GB RAM per 1TB of storage for a moderately used pool. If there are few users, then you can get by with half the RoT RAM. If it's a write heavy environment with lots of users, you will need more RAM per TB of storage.
 
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