• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Hardware RAID for AMD Athlon 500MHz PC?

V

V@no

n00b
Joined
Mar 28, 2012
Messages
9
Hello.

A few days ago I've learned the hard way that hardware raid doesn't mean a PCI card, there also could be software based raid PCI cards...
With the card I got, which uses driver (aka CPU) for RAID5 calculations, the system become unresponsive caused by 100% usage, to the point that even cursor freezes and jumps around the screen (even with RAID1 what the...!!!)

So now I'm in search to find a cheap (<$50) hardware based RAID5 (RAID1 as last resort) IDE card (8 hard drives preferably) for a very old AMD athlon 500mhz, 256MB RAM PC

So far I found a very cheap "Dell P/N 9K646 LSI Logic Quad IDE RAID Controller PCI Card" and "LSI MegaRAID i4 511 4-Channel ATA/IDE RAID Controller" which essentially the same cards (?)
But I'm not 100% sure that any of these cards will work on Windows XP or even if they improve any performance on such ancient PC and if these cards support booting from (the PC's BIOS does support boot from addon cards)

Any suggestions?

Thank you.
 
I have one here with (i believe) 256MB RAM module on board that i am not using. Let me unpack it and i'll get you the specs.

Promise Supertrak SX6000 - 128MB RAM 6 ATA channels, PM me if interested.
 
Last edited:
Those higher end Promise cards like the SX6000 should do the trick if I recall. Most of the hardware RAID from that era was aimed at SCSI disks not IDE, but there were a few with dedicated processing on the card and IDE connectors. Another good one would be the Adaptec AAA-UDMA if you can find one.

Just out of curiousity, why the ancient legacy system and CPU? Not that there is anything wrong with that, I have a several OLD machines I tinker with from time to time just to see what new limits I can push them to.
 
i intended to throw this card on a relatively old VIA powered mini-itx board in a modded Powermac G4 case to make a funky fileserver (mostly for giggles) but never got around to it. I'm curious what V@no has in mind as well... retro gaming system?
 
Thank you for the replies.

As much as the SX6000 sounds good, it physically won't fit in the case...I mean it's a monster board!

The PC I'm trying to resurrect will be used for very limited things, such as excel, printing and faxing, it will replace even more ancient 486 pc barely running Windows NT...
Well, because what it's going to be used for it really doesn't need anything better, keeping the data protected is the goal of the raid system.
Right now it setup to do daily backups, it still would be a pain in the ___ if system drive fails one day.
The "HighPoint RocketRAID 454" that I got now, makes the system virtually unusable while it does heavy writing to the disk, so if one day it require array rebuilt, you can forget do anything on that computer for at least 10 hours (that's with 3 x 80gb disks). It would take less then a hour restore system with a daily backup image...so it's just not worth the trouble, IMO...

Again, thank you for the suggestions.
 
don't bother, just throw away or donate the dinosaur pc to school, even a single core P4 2.4Ghz with 512GB ram running on winxp is extremely slow in comparison to a half decent PC, you can get a dual core pc with 2GB ram for as little as $200~300 if you shop around.
 
You can probably find a better PC in the trash.

Keep the 486 however, a museum might be interested !
 
Oh, c'mon guys, you suggest me spend another $200-300 on something that most likely won't have any raid. And besides I kind of hinted that $50 is what I'm willing to spend on this...

I understand that most people who visit this forum have no problem on spending hundreds on upgrades every month or so, to keep up with the technology, and as shocking as it might sound, other have different mentality, such as why do the upgrade if the old stuff works as good as anything new could possibly offer, well, at least what it's being used for...There is no difference if you print out a document form a intel quad core 3.6ghz or a athlon 500mhz.
Now if the PC would unrepairable died, then perhaps an upgrade would be considered.
flowchart-20071.png


Now that I think about it, maybe there is a way have some kind of "passive" software "raid1", so the data from disk1 would be copied in the background to disk2 when system is idling?
 
Honestly, they're right...spend $50 on craigslist for an abundant p4/2.4 and don't worry about the hardware RAID. The computer would be faster as a bonus. Hell, I have p4/2.4 and faster systems just given to me lately... I would give you one if you lived close to me.
 
I was recently at a PC hardware recycler that had a couple SX6000s sitting on the shelf. In case anyone is searches up this thread and is looking for one. Doubt they'd want much for them. I might go back soon and pick one up, along with a 12MB VooDoo II I spotted, would make a nice retro system setup.
 
How many drives are in the system now, and how big are they? From that era, I would guess 120-250GB or so. Since RAID5 can only handle one failure, it might be easier to pick up a cheap RAID1 SATA PCI card and 2 used 1TB drives. You could probably do it for about $100, giving you more storage and still have the ability to survive a single drive failure. Also, you'll draw less power probably and generate less heat and noise.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top