[wplug] pci-express question

[Michael Semcheski]

I'm going to tack onto Patrick's question a semi-answer that he wasn't
looking for and a question of my own.

I built a box at work with an Adaptec 21610SA 16-port SATA adapter /
RAID controller.  It does hardware RAID 5 (among other things.)  One
limitation is that you can only have 5 drives in an array.  So, I've got
15 400GB SATA drives hanging off of it, for a total of ~4TB (on 3
different volumes, plus one disk as a universal hot swap).  So there's a
real RAID card that doesn't need anything too fancy -- its just plain
old low profile 66 mhz PCI.

On long (250MB+) operations it can read and write about 40MB/sec.  Not
world beating, but about twice as fast as my old 15,000 rpm 3x36gb SCSI
RAID5 hanging off of a Dell PERC 3DI.

So there's the sort of semi-answer that wasn't asked for -- a non 'real
RAID' card doing duty.  All told, it comes in comfortably below $1.00 /GB.

My question to all who care to answer, is what kind of performance do
_you_ get / expect from your drive subsystems.  I'm looking to build
something with a smaller capacity and higher IO speeds.  I'd like to
know what is achievable.

Thanks,

Mike

Patrick Wagstrom wrote:
> I've got a hardware question for y'all.
>
> I'm looking at getting a raid card - a real raid card not one of the
> cheapo ones that does it all in software (besides, linux can do that
> anyway).  Most of the good cards are PCI-X or PCI-E x8.  PCI-X boards
>  tend to be a bit expensive and lack some of the features I'd like
> for a desktop machine.  This leaves me looking at PCI-E.
>
> An easy way to get extra PCI-E x8 or x16 slot on a motherboard is to
> purchase an SLI board (either two x16 slots, or some of the new
> hotness that have quad x16 slots).  Are the x16 slots on SLI mobos
> only for video cards or do they also work with other PCI-E x8 or
> PCI-E x16 cards such as RAID?
>
> Thanks!
>
> --Patrick
>
>
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