Which LSI SATA/SAS combo card works with SATA disks?

[sbarnhart]

I've read here that people have had success using them and some are listed in the ESX io compatibility guide. But I'm having trouble mapping what's available on say, Newegg, against the io compatibility guide with regard to part numbers -- Newegg lists several, with a choice of 4 or 8 ports and PCI-X or PCI-e slot compatibility.

I'm about to get approval to throw together a whitebox ESX system for testing and I want to make sure I get the disk I/O part right. The motherboard (using quad-core compatible intel mainboards) choice doesn't seem as complex.

[azn2kew]

If you're use it for testing, these are the boxes that Dave has collected.

If you want high end sandbox for ESX, then get yourself a Quad Cores AMD Phenom with 8-16GB of RAM will does the job really well, also gather with 5 x - 500 SATA drives are plenty space for your VMFS. LSI SATA controllers depends on your budget, you can get decent one look on ebay or newegg I saw some good one.

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

"The Power of Knowledge"

[sbarnhart]

Thanks, but I'm looking for a real specific map to products I can buy versus chipset references. I've seen that link but it doesn't provide

specific enough model numbers, at least to me, of stuff to actually buy.

I'm sticking to Intel based boards and CPUs, planning on 8GB RAM and probably (from what I've seen) 1.5TB RAID-1. I'd prefer RAID-5 as real high end disk performance isn't all that important.