:: Re: [DNG] do I need drivers for
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Author: Antony Stone
Date:  
To: dng
Subject: Re: [DNG] do I need drivers for
On Wednesday 22 June 2022 at 00:10:51, o1bigtenor via Dng wrote:

> Have found some PCIe 3.0 cards with 16 SATA port count.
>
> Do I need any kind of special driver to use this many SATA ports?


tito has a good question - what sort of cards are they?

But, in principle, no, you do not need any special driver to use a ridiculous
number of SATA ports, or disks with any sort of connection.

I have a machine with a motherboard having 6 SATA ports, into which are
connected one SSD and five HDDs; it also has two USB3 ports into which are
plugged two Fantec 8-drive external cabinets, each containing 8 SATA disks, so
the total range of my /dev/sdX devices is /dev/sda to /dev/sdv.

The standard (Beowulf at present) kernel just handles this fine. I can do MD-
RAID and LVM2 (and also both) with the devices with no problem.

Many years ago I did the same sort of thing with IDE - I had PCI cards with
two IDE connectors, each connector capable of two devices each (master +
slave), and I could build machines with four such cards in (so, 4 x 2 x 2 = 16
drives in total) again without doing anything special to the kernel.


Antony.

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value for money, tough luck for us."

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