Yeah, that lexicon is extremely helpful. Thanks.

And just so people are not confused: like you write, a one-lane PCIe card has two ports and caps out at 250 MB/sec. And a port multiplier connects to only one of those ports, which is why it's governed at 125 MB/sec, no matter how fast the RAID should be.

You'd need to connect two port mulitpliers to that one-lane card and RAID them together if you want to harness the full 250 MB/sec available.

http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/sata-hardware-raid-enclosure.htm

here's a loop for you all. It claims HARDWARE RAID in the enclosure, and this (unknown if it actually is or not) but this with the Sonnet e4p pci-e card (4 lanes on that baby) should make the system ROCK!

We just have to make sure that the enclosure above is really a harware raid and not misleading advert.

Can anyone care to comment?

Thanks

Damon

Wow. Port multiplier hardware RAID - seems too good to be true, but I can't really say.

RE earlier post: just had an interesting exchange with a Firmtek tech about accessing all 250 MB/sec of a one-lane card. Evidently, that's just theoretical...

From Firmtek: "Every 1x card that I have tested has been limited to 150MB/sec. in actual performance. I understand that in theory a 1x card should support a bandwidth of up to 250 but I have never found that to be true in performance tests. If you require more than 150MB/sec. you will want a 4-port PCIe card for the Mac Pro."

Serleejus:

here's a loop for you all. It claims HARDWARE RAID in the enclosure, and this (unknown if it actually is or not) but this with the Sonnet e4p pci-e card (4 lanes on that baby) should make the system ROCK!

Nice find. Though the fact only one sata cable connects it limits the bandwith to a theoretical 150 MB/s in case of sata1 and 300 MB/s in case of sata2 (don't you love all those version... sigh, sometime I long back to the days of the C64) That means that of all the lanes the pci-e card has available, the bandwith of only 2 will actually be used. If you find such device using multilane connections, I'd say we have a winner though.

funckdren:

From Firmtek: "Every 1x card that I have tested has been limited to 150MB/sec. in actual performance. I understand that in theory a 1x card should support a bandwidth of up to 250 but I have never found that to be true in performance tests. If you require more than 150MB/sec. you will want a 4-port PCIe card for the Mac Pro."

 Good point! There is a reason the marketing people add theoretical to those statements of available bandwith, cause no company likes a class action lawsuit by angry misled users. Which reminds me of another thing influencing bandwith and data transfer in harddisk raids, block size. I'll add it to the lexicon later.

Well.. al this is causing a headache and i now am drinking a well deserved glass of fine merlot...

Ok.. let's find an affordable HARDWARE raid enclosure with multiple sata 2 connectors.

Serleejus:

Well.. al this is causing a headache and i now am drinking a well deserved glass of fine merlot...

 

Ok.. let's find an affordable HARDWARE raid enclosure with multiple sata 2 connectors.

 Oh, trust me, I was way past headaches and a few crates of mentioned merlot before I found the parts needed to build the solution I chose in the end. And keep in mind the original poster looked for something he could connect with a laptop. I'm not even sure if multilane solutions exist for laptops, or even the posibility to add more then one pci-e card. But I'll have a look.

Hmm found this and it doesnt bode well...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard

Which leads me to the conclusion the only PCI-e card you can connect to a laptop is of the x1 type, allowing you the theoretical speed of 250 MB/s and according to earlier posts the actual speed of 150 MB/s. Still, that's 1300 Mb/s which should be enough for a few layers of compressed HD, if you aren't working with any hardware depending on the same slot.

RTX 400-SJ - Hard drive array - 4 ( 4 ) x hot-swap - 3.5 inch x 1/3H - Interfaces: 4 x Serial ATA-300 - Serial ATA-300 - 9.1 Inch

Ok..here is one by Weibetech, but i am not sure if it is HARDWARE raid... It does have 4 esata connectors though so thoroughput speed shold not be a problem..

Any Ideas regarding this?

retails for about $750

Thanks

Damon

Ok.. it is Harware Capable on PC with the following.

RAIDable on Windows with 4 port SATA PCI card with hardware RAID capabilities - our part number, PCI-10

?? would the tempo esata 4p by sonnet allow hardware raid on PC and OSX?

Nevermind... its just JBOD.. not even raid for the above model... I think the merlot is allowing me to have even more "Wishfull Thinking"

Meant "Software" raid and JBOD

RTX400-SJ/RTX400H-SJ -- View specs

• 4 TrayFree bays
• 4 eSATA ports
• Up to 200 MB/s when software RAIDing (About 50 MB/s with each connection)
• Shock Absorbing Bays
• Separate key lock for each HDD
• Upgrade to RTX400H-SJ and get All-Metal Bays!

Ok.. i:m done.. I need to call Wiebetech... because apparantly, they offer HARDWARE raid in the products mentioned here, which includes the one i mentioned in a prior post that was also too confusing.

Here is an explanation from their website.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WiebeTech offers several products which include hardware RAID controllers.

Any thoughts Now???

Hate to say it but HOLY SMOKES

Damon (i only have time because rendering takes sooo long)

"Ok.. let's find an affordable HARDWARE raid enclosure with multiple sata 2 connectors"

Define "affordable".

 Well if you aren't afraid of some tinkering by yourself, and have a desktop instead of a laptop, I'd go for this if i were looking to find fast external diskspace at a reasonable price.

raidcard: about 450$ to 550$ for one of these

Areca ARC-1120ML (8x SATA300 RAID PCI-X64/133) 256MB Ext.SFF-8088 for pci-x

Areca ARC-1220ML (8x SATA300 RAID PCI-E x8 256MB) Ext SFF-8088 for pci-e

case: about 400$ for any case that can hold 8 harddisks, a psu to power the drives and 2 sata-multilane connection brackets

cables: about 130$ for 2 multilanes and 8 short sata's

harddisk: 8 sata2 drives at the lowest price per GB currently available, that would be 500GB at about 130$ a piece, totalling 1040$ but prices change fast.

This will get you 3.5 TB in raid 5 for 2100$, and the cost of a day of your own manhours to build the thing and set it up. But it will be blazingly fast at 350MB/s sustained with redundancy. Compared to other prices I find I'd call it relatively cheap.

http://www.3ware.com/products/Ext_serial_ata2-9000.asp

ok. Finally!! i seem to have found a 4 bay hardware raid enclosure and its affordable.

this time i am not missing anything