Question 1

What controller card do you recommend??

Accepted Answer

That is up to you.  What type of performance do you want?  You could use on-board connections if you wish.  Each drive bay has its own SATA III connector and the back has two molar power plugs.  I happen to be using a LSI 9266-8i with (2x) SAS 3 ports to SATA III breakout cables (8x SATA connections).

I also looked at Adaptec and Area cards but finally settled on LSI.  All the reviews were about equal so, for me it was mainly a coin toss.  So far, I can say I am happy with it.

I am not very fond of the 'software' raid cards so anything that is less than say, $150 I would not consider for my system.  I, personally, have not had the best of luck with HighPoint cards so I tend to stay away from them.

My Setup:
- Top two bays are Plextor M5P Xtreme 256GB SSD in Raid 1.
{Learned the hard way to consider SSDs the same as HDD when it comes to failures and Raid setups to help mitigate against said failures.}
- Two middle are 500GB HDD in Raid 0
{I only store temp files on here as if this raid fails I lose everything.  Kinda hard to be upset if I lose temp files and gain some speed from the stripping.}
- Bottom two are free but can have anything added hot-swap.
{I am considering buying a third Plextor to setup as a hot-spare.}
- Plus I have two 4TB (3.5") HGST HDD in a Raid 1 config to fill up all 8 of my break-out cables. (Before WD purchased them.)
{My 'data' drives.}

Question 2

If I use 6 ssd for streaming data, given they are all streaming via 1 Sata III only I will not be able to stream each with full speed right? ( ssd speed is 3gbs ) . If I wanted to stream full speed via sata III I would be able to use only 2 ssd? 3gbs x2 = 6 gbs = sata III speed?

Any thoughts on this ?

thank you

Accepted Answer

This drive bay is not a concentrator or anything so you would not be bottlenecked by a single 6Gbps connection, if that's what you were thinking.  The actual answer to your question would depend more on your motherboard or SATA/RAID interface card because this little backplane is just a passthrough for the six SATA cables, giving you a convenient way to swap drives in and out.  Keep in mind that most SSDs won't actually saturate a SATA link at 3Gbps anyway: only in the newest class (like the Samsung 850 Pro) will you actually find them exceeding 3 Gbps  - and even that's theoretical anyway IMO - so if you're driving them with 6Gbps links, there really is no worry.

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