ATA RAID Card

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CentronMe

2[H]4U
Joined
Apr 3, 2002
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I am looking at going with a RAID 0 setup in my main box. My current setup is an 80GB Seagate Baracuda 7200.7 drive with 8MB of cache. The new drives for the array would be the same model, but with only 2MB of cache. So I am in the market for an ATA100 RAID card. I found this card for $39.00. Has anyone ever used anything from ACARD before? I really dont want to spend $71 on the Promise card as my next upgrade will be to SATA drives and the board will have the controller built in.
 
I have the 6885 four channel version, and its working pretty good, im booting XP from it which actually slowed down my boottime compared to when i booted from the onboard IDE channel, maybe it got something to do with XP having to initialize the card and drivers during bootup.

But when it finished booting its quite fast, im getting 86mb/s with 2*120gig seagates striped, compared to my old onboard IDE channel i only got from 29mb/s to 44mb/s depending on which partition i tested.

But i see you already changed your sig :p Hows it running ? did you get the above mentioned card ?
 
Its on order. Thanks. :p

I just changed my sig when the forum came back up expecting to go RAID soon.
 
Neocorteqz said:
Do your Drives show up as a SCSI device? Mine does using a ATA 133 card.
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It should do this, as any drives connected to controllers on the PCI bus are treated as SCSI devices. It's one of the reasons why the 137 GB limit with IDE drives can be circumvented by using a controller card. SCSI drives have no such limit.
 
Elledan said:
It should do this, as any drives connected to controllers on the PCI bus are treated as SCSI devices. It's one of the reasons why the 137 GB limit with IDE drives can be circumvented by using a controller card. SCSI drives have no such limit.
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Ahh. thanks.
 
Actually, there is a limit on SCSI.


It's something like 2TB/volume tho.
 
ameoba said:
Actually, there is a limit on SCSI.


It's something like 2TB/volume tho.
Click to expand...

Something tells me we will not have to worry about that for a while. :p
 
ameoba said:
Actually, there is a limit on SCSI.


It's something like 2TB/volume tho.
Click to expand...
I was referring to (currently) sane limitations (<1 TB), but you're right, of course :)
 
Just the other day at work, we were looking into upgrading our RAID array. Probably looking at 2.5-3TB right there.

This is only supporting 250-300 active users, plus a few hundred small temporary accounts..
 
ameoba said:
Just the other day at work, we were looking into upgrading our RAID array. Probably looking at 2.5-3TB right there.

This is only supporting 250-300 active users, plus a few hundred small temporary accounts..
Click to expand...
So with 'volume' you mean the size of the array, i.e. what the controller card/drivers report to the OS?
 
ameoba said:
Actually, there is a limit on SCSI.


It's something like 2TB/volume tho.
Click to expand...
thats in the OS right? I'm thinking with the current growth in Drive sizes, the next version of Windows would fix this.
 
Manufacturers websites were saying that it was the limit of a 'volume' for a SCSI device. You could have an array larger than 2TB, but it would have to report itself as multiple volumes (LUNs probably).

The OS could then work around this by using a LVM and rejoin the space.
 
ameoba said:
Manufacturers websites were saying that it was the limit of a 'volume' for a SCSI device. You could have an array larger than 2TB, but it would have to report itself as multiple volumes (LUNs probably).

The OS could then work around this by using a LVM and rejoin the space.
Click to expand...
Any chance of SA SCSI fixing this?
 
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