Reddit reviews Supermicro PCI Express x4 Low Profile SAS RAID Controller (AOC-SASLP-MV8)
We found 4 Reddit comments about Supermicro PCI Express x4 Low Profile SAS RAID Controller (AOC-SASLP-MV8). Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
PCI-E x4 interfaceSoftware RAID supportedStorage arrays for Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Nearline BackupUp to 8 SAS/SATA disk drives, activity LED indicated for each drive (LED cables not includedData Transfer Rates: Upto 3.0 Gigabits/sec per port
I've got this in my unraid box. haven't had a problem yet. you'll also need some cables like this though.
The question about PCI-E SATA cards is how much you are willing to spend and what available PCI-E slots do you have on your motherboard.
The cheapest I've tried (with slowest throughput) when you only have PCI-E 1x slots free is to use four port SATA cards like this Marvell 88SE9215 chipset based card for $33 on Amazon:
(http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AZ9T3OU)
If you got at least a PCI-E 4x slot you can something faster for $100 - $160 such as (note these are 8 port cards):
On eBay used:
A number of the above solutions are not as fast as you can go since they use PCI-E 4x slots. But 8x slot cards can cost a lot more. Personally I don't notice the slow down as much since I'm really using these drives to stream and don't notice that parity checks and moving data from cache to permanent drives take longer.
That all depends on what you want to do with it. I use a Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 that I got for ~$130 on Amazon (actually have the older version as well the AOC-SASLP-MV8 but that doesn't support quite as large of drives so stick with the SAS2 now). It supports 8 SATA drives via 2 SAS to SAS connectors. Much easier to run 2 cables than 8. It doesn't have any hardware RAID support, but I don't want that anyway. Trying to rebuild a hardware RAID built out of 8 or more 2+ TB drives would be incredibly long and painful. I use SnapRAID instead for parity inside the OS.
Check out the UnRaid forum. I'm looking at these:
-Supermicro PCI Express x4 Low Profile SAS RAID Controller (AOC-SASLP-MV8) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002KGLDXU/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_UPmFxb8KHH59P