I contacted PC-Pitstop to see if they would sell me the Areca ARC-1300ix 16, as it had started dribbling into stock in Canada and North America. They mentioned that one customer had an issue where the board could only see eight drives instead of the full 16, and wanted to wait until a new shipment to see if the problem persists before selling me anything.
Very nice of a store to say so. I’ve been waiting a long time though, and yet another card has risen to viability…
The LSI SAS3081E-R may provide salvation. Image courtesy of New Egg.
I’ve been told that LSI SAS3081E-R is capable of setting up drives individually, rather than requiring a RAID mode be set. It all seems to be hearsay and rumours though, no one can 100 percent confirm it. Fortunately it’s also sold with Sun gear, which makes compatibility for OpenSolaris a no-brainer. New Egg sells them for US$209, and apparently it’s on PCI-E x8, offering more bandwidth than the ARC-1300ix 16 and having to share it with less ports. Of course LSI can’t decide whether it offers 2400MB/s or 2500MB/s according to its site — given that PCI-E is 250MB/s unidirectional per lane, it can only offer a lower 2000MB/s.
In the meant time, I picked an HP NC364T on eBay Australia for AU$348, and am eagerly awaiting its arrival. The quad-gigabit Ethernet card uses dual Intel 82571EB chips over PCI-E x4, which are functionally identical to the 82751GB chips found on the Intel PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Low Profile adapter — for all intents and purposes making this a rebadge. Considering both cards go retail for around AU$1000, it’s an absolute steal, and should be fun to team or load balance over. By and large a dedicated network card should not only reduce the latency over an integrated, but may help maximise network throughput.
While I'm not quite ready to go 4GbE, the HP NC364T should help me grow a little.
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