Re: future hardware

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

Dan wrote:

>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?
>
There may still be m/b available with multiple PCI busses. Don't know if 
you are interested in a low budget solution, but that would address 
bandwidth and use existing hardware.

Idle curiousity: what kind of case are you using for the drives? I will 
need to spec a machine with eight drives in the December-January timeframe.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO TMR Associates, Inc
  Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979