From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: "Dan" <dan@korstad.net>
Subject: future hardware
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2006 07:04:43 -0500
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I have been using an older 64bit system, socket 754 for a while now.  It has
the old PCI bus 33Mhz.  I have two low cost (no HW RAID) PCI SATA I cards
each with 4 ports to give me an eight disk RAID 6.  I also have a Gig NIC,
on the PCI bus.  I have Gig switches with clients connecting to it at Gig
speed.

As many know you get a peak transfer rate of 133 MB/s or 1064Mb/s from that
PCI bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peripheral_Component_Interconnect

The transfer rate is not bad across the network but my bottle neck it the
PCI bus.  I have been shopping around for new MB and PCI-express cards.  I
have been using mdadm for a long time and would like to stay with it.  I am
having trouble finding an eight port PCI-express card that does not have all
the fancy HW RAID which jacks up the cost.  I am now considering using a MB
with eight SATA II slots onboard.  GIGABYTE GA-M59SLI-S5 Socket AM2 NVIDIA
nForce 590 SLI MCP ATX.

What are other users of mdadm using with the PCI-express cards, most cost
effective solution?