[Arm-netbook] EOMA server standard

[Mehmet Mersin]

On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> On 10/26/2012 04:29 PM, Mehmet Mersin wrote:
>
>> My reasoning is even for a home server, if it's a file server I want to have
>> at least 2 SATA ports for RAID-1. And for a router I want to have at least
>> 2 native (not USB) ethernet ports. But these also mean EOMA-68 is not for me :)
>
> Why not instead simply have a SATA port expander on the chassis side and
> run it off the single on-board SATA port? There's nothing to stop you
> from plugging a 5:1 SiliconImage SATA expander into the card's SATA
> port, is there?

I heard (but haven't researched much or tried) that raid performance
of port expanders,
especially cheap ones are not very good. There's no bandwidth problem
with single SATA-3 port
having 600MB/s theoretical limit, but I don't know any decently priced
expander chip
that can take advantage of this bandwidth. Also not all SATA
controllers in SoC's
support expanders. And when you use RAID mode of these chips and show
your RAID setup
as a single drive, performance is worse than soft RAID.

-mehmet mersin