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2 RAID cards on one motherboard

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wheatbix

Member
Joined
May 17, 2002
Location
Sydney, Australia
2 RAID cards on one motherboard + opinions on planned rig

I'm planning on building a new rig (aimed at being a fileserver). The specs were going to be (still changing) a dual xeon 2.8ghz, Tyan Thunder s7501 mobo , 4gb ecc ram, 2x adaptec ATA Raid cards , 8x 200mb Western Digital HDD's w/ 8mb cache in RAID 0, 1 SCSI u320 hdd to install operating system on

Do you think that there will be any problems with having that much HDD space (1.6tb - i know that I will loose a bit in formatting) and having two RAID cards on one motherboard? The rig will be in a 2U rackmount case (so expandability is limited). Any feedback or opinions at all would be great.

Cheers
 
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u can get 3ware cards with 8 ports on them they may even do a 12 port version.
the only problem i can think of is a driver clash. iv never ran two of one thing but u could run 2 vodoo2 cards one one board so perhaps it would work?
 
aftermath said:
u can get 3ware cards with 8 ports on them they may even do a 12 port version.
the only problem i can think of is a driver clash. iv never ran two of one thing but u could run 2 vodoo2 cards one one board so perhaps it would work?

if you are going to spend all of that money on the rig, you should probably go for a better raid card as aftermath suggested that has 8 ports. that will ensure a much more reliable setup just when it comes to compatability with 2 identical cards. i you are paying all that for an amazing system, don't skimp on where the main focus is. that'd like buying a network server with a $5 nic @ 10 mbps (okay, it's hardly that bad, but you get the idea)

if you are dead serious and want the best performance, a 3ware escalade 7500-8 ata 133 raid controller would be your best bet.

and yes, driver conflict may be a problem with 2 cards... even if they are different brands, i am not sure how the computer's bios would handle having two cards and which card's bios will be initialized first... i suppuse you could contact adaptec and ask them if it would work. they'd probably be able to tell you the best out of anybody...
 
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