I occasionally look at the PCIe-to-SATA market and find it confusing. It appears polarized into either cards from a reputable brand and very expensive, even with few SATA ports, or cards from an unknown brand and relatively affordable. What's your experience with this and what can you recommend (2-port or 4-port)? Are the cheap cards safe & reliable or are they to be avoided?
Basically: they can be buggy. Either they work fine for you, or you hit an edge case and have trouble. They can also have worse performance as they only have one SATA controller and split it amongst the drives.
If you're doing this at home, you can get used enterprise gear on eBay (like an LSI SAS HBA) for the same price or cheaper than brand-new consumer gear, and it will probably still be more reliable (I built a 130 TB NAS for my friend's video production business and literally everything aside from the drives and the cables was bought used on online auction, and it's been humming along fine for a while now - the only part that was bad was one stick of RAM, but the ECC errors told me that before I even got around to running my tests on the sticks)
I've been running older SAS cards for years and it's been doing just fine. They go for cheap on eBay. Each SAS port serve four SATA drives, using SAS-to-SATA cables.
Just make sure to get one that runs in IT mode or you have to mess with the firmware.
> Just make sure to get one that runs in IT mode or you have to mess with the firmware.
In case some people wonder what "IT mode" is, as I used to some years ago, what you basically want is a card that will expose the drives directly to the OS, as opposed to "volumes".
In other terms, if the card is a RAID controller, it may insist on you creating arrays and only expose those. You can circumvent it by creating single-drive arrays, but it's a pain.
Some cards can do both, but it's usually not advertised. Non-RAID cards also tend to be cheaper. Others (usually LSI) can be flashed with a non-RAID firmware, but again, it's less of a hassle to not have to do it.
