Sata III Controller - Recomendations?

[jmone]

I'm over the "funny" JMicron controller but I need more ports than the 6 x ICH10 ones (I have 6 x Data Drives, 1 x OS, 1, ODD). I don't need RAID Support etc (I use Drive Bender for Disk Aggregation, and back up everthing to a WHS). Any recomendation on either a plain:
1) 8+ Sata III Card (and I'll put all my drives on it), or
2) 4 Port Sata III Card (and I'll keep some drives on the ICH10)

Thanks
Nathan

[hdsentinel]

For high-end product I'd recommend 3ware 9750. You can connect 8+ drives (even 100's) on it
For a cheaper but effective solution, maybe you can try HighPoint 6xx models. 620/622 were tested without problems (these are 2 ports only), 640 (4 ports) should also work.
These are of course fully supported in Hard Disk Sentinel Pro (HighPoint ones may require latest beta version:
http://www.hdsentinel.com/beta4/hdsenti ... p40011.zip )

[jmone]

FYI - I just sent a test report as I now have 6 x 4TB drives connected to a new Highpoint Rocket Raid 2720SGL adapter it it seems to work much better with reporting info than the JMicron ports
Thanks
Nathan

[hdsentinel]

Thanks so much !!
I always love to see things work correctly, especially on these really new and hi-capacity drives + the combination of HighPoint 2720 controller

So a good tip for everybody looking for SATA III controllers: HighPoint 2720
Adaptec 6405 (and further Adaptec SATA III RAID controllers) are also supported in Hard Disk Sentinel 4.10.

[jmone]

FYI - It all ended in tears.... Here is the post I submtted to Highpoint but no real response from HighPoint so far.... Anyway, I restored from backup and am reripping all my Optical discs after reformating all my HDD....

==============
I have 6 x 4TB presented as one volume using Drive Bender (it just uses NTFS Mount Points) and it was working fine using the Std ICHR10 Sata Ports. I installed the HighPoint and connected the drives, booted windows, installed the driver from the included CD, rebooted and it all seemed fine. However on the Next Boot, CHKDSK started prior to windows with the following:
- Error detected in index $I30
then a couple of hours of repeated
- recovering orphaned file xxx to directory xxxx

At first it all seemed fine but ... some files are corrupted. It turns that while the files seem fine their content can be from other files, eg "song.mp3" actually a bit of a video! I am restoring some files from Backup using Bitsum to check which ones are corrupted but there are many video files that are only of BD disks so it wwill take a long time to re-rip if needed.

Can you please advise of any experience with this issue, as I've not seen it before and would like to understand;
- what it is,
- what causes it
- is there a configuration option not set correctly (Note: I do not want any RAID, just needed to add additional SATA Ports). I have not flashed any newer BIOS for the Card and see that there is a RAID and Non-Raid Option
- etc
==============

[hdsentinel]

It sounds really weird what happened.

Personally I'd also contact HighPoint about the issue as I can only imagine that there may be a compatibility issue between the controller and 4 TB disks. I wonder if there may be any firmware / driver update required as 4 TB hard disks are not really common and may not properly managed by all controllers.

Did you use memtest to verify the physical memory? Such corruption may be caused by memory issue. Personally I experienced such situation previously.

[jmone]

I know! I'd never seen the behviour before and no I did not MemTest but given it occured with the swap to the Highpoint.... Anyway I raised a ticket with both Highpoint and Drive Bender (the drive pooling SW I use) both shed no light on the issue. I did get the following post however I thought was interesting from another Drive Bender users but I can not verify the verasity of it:

I have all Hitachi 5K3000 2TB drives, and I've owned several Highpoint controllers including the 2720 SGL, they don't play well together.

To keep cost down, my suggestion would be a SAS2008 chip based controller such as: LSI Megaraid 9240-8i, SAS 9211-8i, IBM M1015, Intel RS2WC080, Dell Perc H200 or H310. These are PCIe 2.0 6GB/s controllers. Ebay is a great place to look.

A word about Highpoint - they write proprietary info to the drive controller and it is a bitch to remove and make your drive usable on other controllers. This may or may not happen, I had 5 drives out of 8 that wouldn't work after using a Highpoint until I found a freeware DOS program that would reset the drive controllers.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for the info !

Yes, I agree this is an interesting situation - so the first idea I got is to check other components (most important the RAM), just to make sure there are no problems with that.

Personally I did not experiene any kind of such problems with any of the HighPoint controllers tested, both SATA and SAS drives worked correctly with them and also the drives could be moved to other system easily. All modern RAID controllers put their configuration info to the hard disks and in very rare cases they may interfere with the configuration of other controller if moved, but generally I'd not say the issue was related to HighPoint.

Anyway, controllers with LSI chips are also fine (supported by HDSentinel - just the M1015 may require an LSI firmware) so if you prefer, you may give them a try.

[jmone]

Thanks - I've taken the pain of the change so I'll leave it alone unless I get more probs!

[jodibecks]

glad I came across this one. this is really useful.

[klauzser]

I didn't know this is possible. Thanks a lot.