Tech Corner

[MaloK]

Yes the chipset is the important part. The thing is i use it as part of a software raid so the card itself can be dumb controller but the software raid will check the raid now and then for errors and that will put quite a load on the card as all the connected disks will be access linearly at the same time. While i don't mind if the card throttle the drives i do mind if it produces error or constantly reset the drive which bad chipsets even in this day and age will do so.
The LSI cards are pretty darn expensive even the ones in it mode (non-raid) and the newer chips will run $400 but the older models (10+ years) are around $70. Which card do you have ?

I have the BEYIMEI PCIE SATA cards, running on ASMedia, ASM1166.

And beside that they can go really hot... They can stand a ZFS re-silvering , no problems...

The 6 ports is 60$ and the 10 ports is 80$. A lot less expensive compared to adapters that support SAS...

What I like is that they have 1x, 2x and 4x. versions, so you can choose the one with the widest bus for your Motherboard, to achieve better performance.

All around a fine product that gives excellent performance and reliability from $ point of view. My oldest one is from 2020 and nothing bad to say about it. It just works...

 

[jaylach]

BTW, the reason that connectors change is actually a good thing. When hardware advances so do the connections. This is to prevent system damage as you can't plug in a device that is not proper for the involved buss.

If the connections didn't change as hardware advances some people would be trying to connect a SATA drive via an IDE ribbon cable.

 

[anewbie]

I have the BEYIMEI PCIE SATA cards, running on ASMedia, ASM1166.

And beside that they can go really hot... They can stand a ZFS re-silvering , no problems...

The 6 ports is 60$ and the 10 ports is 80$. A lot less expensive compared to adapters that support SAS...

What I like is that they have 1x, 2x and 4x. versions, so you can choose the one with the widest bus for your Motherboard, to achieve better performance.

All around a fine product that gives excellent performance and reliability from $ point of view. My oldest one is from 2020 and nothing bad to say about it. It just works...

fyi: zfs resilvering isn't too bad or as bad as zfs scrub. If there is resilvering the writes will throttle things. Currently the 6 port version is around $38 which is not bad. I really like LSI chips but the prices for non-raid is excessive. Of course the chips actually support raid as they only change the bios.

 

[anewbie]

BTW, the reason that connectors change is actually a good thing. When hardware advances so do the connections. This is to prevent system damage as you can't plug in a device that is not proper for the involved buss.

If the connections didn't change as hardware advances some people would be trying to connect a SATA drive via an IDE ribbon cable.

Depends on the specific change; some changes have rather little value.

As for using ide ribbon with sata drive; they could have of course made the sata interface compatible with the ribbons

 

[jaylach]

Depends on the specific change; some changes have rather little value.

As for using ide ribbon with sata drive; they could have of course made the sata interface compatible with the ribbons

Not so sure that they could have made a SATA drive work on an IDE channel as IDE was a parallel connection while SATA is serial.

It could be argued that being able to use a card to mount an M.2 drive in a PCIe slot disproves the concept but it does not as M.2 and PCIe actually use the same buss. Again it could be argued that @Colin_T video card disproves this but, again, it is the same basic buss that is modified for faster connectivity.

 

[anewbie]

Not so sure that they could have made a SATA drive work on an IDE channel as IDE was a parallel connection while SATA is serial.

The wires do not dictate the protocol; and it would be silly to think such. While there is no technical requirement that they change the connector or cables; it of course made sense to do so as it allowed for a much smaller cable which had some incremental advantages but not technical advantages.

So while the change was not strictly cosmetic it is rather silly to think they were forced to make the change for technical reason after all the ribbon cable had far more wires than the sata cable.

Such is the case with some of the more recent changes at times though the benefits are much smaller than the reduction of ribbon cable to sata cable. And in fact some of the changes don't stick and later get dropped or rarely adapted by others. It is a change with marginal benefit but a very large royal pain to users who now need yet another cable or adapter.
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For example we look at usb 2.0 which has no less than 6 different type of connectors. And while one might argue there is a decent need for a smaller connector for portable devices than the original usb 2.0 interface - by the time you get to #6 you can go mad keeping track of all the different adapters/cables.

 

[jaylach]

The wires do not dictate the protocol; and it would be silly to think such. While there is no technical requirement that they change the connector or cables; it of course made sense to do so as it allowed for a much smaller cable which had some incremental advantages but not technical advantages.

So while the change was not strictly cosmetic it is rather silly to think they were forced to make the change for technical reason after all the ribbon cable had far more wires than the sata cable.

Such is the case with some of the more recent changes at times though the benefits are much smaller than the reduction of ribbon cable to sata cable. And in fact some of the changes don't stick and later get dropped or rarely adapted by others. It is a change with marginal benefit but a very large royal pain to users who now need yet another cable or adapter.
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For example we look at usb 2.0 which has no less than 6 different type of connectors. And while one might argue there is a decent need for a smaller connector for portable devices than the original usb 2.0 interface - by the time you get to #6 you can go mad keeping track of all the different adapters/cables.

Taking USB as an example there are, of course, many connection types yet they use the same basic buss but the capability does change. Still you could not use USB2 as a video connection yet USB5 can be used as such.

Don't bother with saying that a USB2 flash drive can be used to display a video file as the flash drive just holds the video file and is transported to the video buss via a media player.

 

[MaloK]

fyi: zfs resilvering isn't too bad or as bad as zfs scrub. If there is resilvering the writes will throttle things. Currently the 6 port version is around $38 which is not bad. I really like LSI chips but the prices for non-raid is excessive. Of course the chips actually support raid as they only change the bios.

Agree, scrubbing 7TB takes 5 hours. loll.

The Asmedia 1166 theoretical speed can to go up to 16Gb/s, basically way overkill for 6 or even 10 SATA3 Drives.

The best part With ZFS, is it doesn't need to reconstruct the Raid after a power loss or crash. Copy on writes insure that there's never losses of "in flight data" and that is where ZFS really is economical compared to other file systems Raid implementation.

 

[anewbie]

Taking USB as an example there are, of course, many connection types yet they use the same basic buss but the capability does change. Still you could not use USB2 as a video connection yet USB5 can be used as such.

Don't bother with saying that a USB2 flash drive can be used to display a video file as the flash drive just holds the video file and is transported to the video buss via a media player.

You keep mis-phrasing what i said to present your arguments which of course is very confusing esp to others. I did not say that USB had at least 6 connector types; i explicitly said that USB-2.0 had 6 connector types; and therefore talking about changing the connector because they change the protocol justify the 6 connector types introduced during the USB-2.0 era.

 

[anewbie]

Agree, scrubbing 7TB takes 5 hours. loll.

The Asmedia 1166 theoretical speed can to go up to 16Gb/s, basically way overkill for 6 or even 10 SATA3 Drives.

The best part With ZFS, is it doesn't need to reconstruct the Raid after a power loss or crash. Copy on writes insure that there's never losses of "in flight data" and that is where ZFS really is economical compared to other file systems Raid implementation.

fyi: a modern mechanical 10gb drive can sustain over 1.5gb/s transfer rate if read linearly so 6 drives can in theory put out close to 10gb/s So for 10 stata3 drive it would in theory be or be very close to bus limited.

 

[MaloK]

fyi: a modern mechanical 10gb drive can sustain over 1.5gb/s transfer rate if read linearly so 6 drives can in theory put out close to 10gb/s So for 10 stata3 drive it would in theory be or be very close to bus limited.

For 38$...

 

[jaylach]

You keep mis-phrasing what i said to present your arguments which of course is very confusing esp to others. I did not say that USB had at least 6 connector types; i explicitly said that USB-2.0 had 6 connector types; and therefore talking about changing the connector because they change the protocol justify the 6 connector types introduced during the USB-2.0 era.

I can't think of 6 types of USB2 connections. Just for my own curiosity could you please list them? I can only think of 2 which would be standard and micro. USB card readers don't count as they are just a connection interface to allow the card to be seen as USB.

 

[anewbie]

I can't think of 6 types of USB2 connections. Just for my own curiosity could you please list them? I can only think of 2 which would be standard and micro. USB card readers don't count as they are just a connection interface to allow the card to be seen as USB.

Standard-A: The most common connector, found on computers and hubs. It has a flat, rectangular shape.
Standard-B: A square connector, often used on peripherals like printers and scanners.
Mini-A: A smaller, less common version of the original Type-A connector.
Mini-B: A smaller version of the Standard-B connector, frequently used on older digital cameras, MP3 players, and game controllers.
Micro-A: A smaller version of the Type-A connector.
Micro-B: A smaller version of the Type-B connector, which became standard for many mobile phones and other portable electronics before USB-C. 
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I can state first hand that over the years i have encountered at least 5 of them on devices i have owned.