Does anyone know if there are any PCIe SATA Gigabit Ethernet combo cards out there ?

I have a machine that needs gigabit ethernet and more sata ports, but it only has a single pcie slot. I can find pci ones, but not pcie.

If the machine mostly just needs quantity of storage, and not super-fast RAID or something, then it may (depending upon the SATA controller) accept a SATA port multiplier. Think of this like a USB hub, except for SATA devices.

Not that port-multipliers are especially slow or anything.

Top two hits when I cut/pasted "PCIe SATA Gigabit Ethernet" into google.ca:

http://www.hitechglobal.com/boards/PCIExpressLX330T.htm
http://www.hitechglobal.com/boards/v4pcie.htm

ProbablyDefinitely expensive, though.

I think you can classify both of those development cards as ludicrously expensive. The Virtex-5 FPGA alone is going to be $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. The Virtex-4 on the second card is the "budget" option

USB network card?

That's what I was thinking, there's a PCIe sata + USB3 card available, and couple that with a gigabit to usb thang.

http://www.everythingusb.com/asus-u3s6-usb-3.0-sata-3-pci-express-18307.html

Good thinking!
Except USB 3.0 ethernet adapters don't seem to exist yet.
But I expect they will show up at DX within a month or two.

And there's no super need for SATA, since USB 3.0 provides similar speeds (and DX has the SATA-->USB3 adapters).

Which means that perhaps a combo USB3 + ethernet PCIe card would do too, if they exist.

I searched Google Images for stuff that does exist, and came up with that thing.

If this article is true, one wouldn't need usb 3.0 for gigabit ethernet anyway...

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2005/07/gigabit-ethernet-and-back-of-the-envelope-calculations.html

There are lots of usb 2.0 to gigabit ethernet adapters available...

*shrug* The article is pretty old and technology has moved on quite a bit but the numbers in the main article are still pretty suspect. The window size it is using is tiny and its not going to give you good performance with that. One of the comments from the author has results from using different buffer sizes and its still not good performance.

Using iperf I get the following results:


That is from a single core HT P4 to an dual core Opteron over GigE. The P4 is one of the original Northwoods so thats around 2003 and the Opteron is a Santa Ana which is around 2006.

Microsoft's "Windows logo requirements" for Ethernet cards require you to achieve at least 70% of the theoretical bandwidth. So presumably most Gbit Ethernet cards can do 700Mbits/s or more, and presumably there aren't any USB2 Ethernet adaptors with Windows logo certification...

Peter

Don't forget that the PCI(e) GigE adapters are FULL-DUPLEX --> they can (in theory, and in practice under Linux) do the 700mb/sec or whatever in BOTH directions simultaneously.. giving between 1000mb/s and 2000mb/s total throughput capability.

Whereas USB2 adapters are stuck somewhere around 250-350mb/sec TOTAL.

Big difference there.

Cheers