Multiple Raid Controllers on a Single Motherboard

[rrbraj]

Hi.

I'm planning on building a storage pc and I was wondering if I'd be able to hook two or more 8 port Raid controllers in one motherboard.

I want to hook up about a dozen or more HDDs to a single mobo using multiple Raid controllers.

If this is at all possible, what is the best motherboard and raid controller model i should use for this....

 

[Branden]

you can shove as many raid controllers onto a mobo as the mobo has slots for.
although, if you want arrays to span disks across different controllers then that's a different issue.

 

[pnorman]

I believe Tom's used multiple RAID cards with software RAID on top for their SSD speed experiments. Mind you, a RAID0 array with that many drives is just asking for trouble...

I believe the cheapest option for a large amount of storage is a SATA card that supports a port multiplier combined with software RAID. I've heard that a card based on the SIL 3124 chipset plus SIL3726 port multipliers works, but haven't tried it myself.

Of course going this method you get into the write hole problem with RAID5/RAID6 but this won't impact serving files as you'll still be able to easily saturate a gigabit ethernet connection.

 

[staats]

I am running 2 LSI 8708EM2 raid cards in my ESXI box. They are 8-port cards and can be found on eBay for under $200 each. Never had any issues with that model.