Need a good (value) raid 5 card

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Rakinos

[H]ard|Gawd
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I'm working on putting together a file server for home use for data storage as well as backup. I plan on starting off with 4, 500 GB sata drives and adding more down the road. Do you guys have any recommendations for a card with 6-8 ports? Right now I have an old mb that I could use (asus a7v333 w. an athlon xp 1800), but I wonder if throwing a gigabit card in there along with a pci-x one would saturate the the bus.
So my questions are: would that mb setup be fine, and if so what pci-x card?
If not, should I just pick up a cheap server mb with pci-x (anyone got an old one or any suggestions?)
Or, would it be better to just go with a new mb/cpu combo and use a pci-express raid 5 card.
This is going to be used to stream dvd-rips, save and serve mpeg 2 files for my mythtv box, as well as backing up documents for the computers throughout the house.
Thanks all in advance.
 
Rakinos said:
Do you guys have any recommendations for a card with 6-8 ports?
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Rakinos said:
Right now I have an old mb that I could use (asus a7v333 w. an athlon xp 1800), but I wonder if throwing a gigabit card in there along with a pci-x one would saturate the the bus.
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In short, yes. A PCI bus is completely saturatable by a gigE card, and since you'd have the storage controller and the ethernet controller on the same bus, you'd only get half a gigabit disk to network. A board with two PCI buses or a PCI-X bus would be preferable if you actually need that much speed. For just serving media (at bitrates you're likely to use) 100 mbit is overkill, though, so it should be just fine.
Rakinos said:
If not, should I just pick up a cheap server mb with pci-x (anyone got an old one or any suggestions?)
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Dual p3 server boards are quite nice. Stay away from Tyan, though - Supermicro or Intel boards are the way to go.
 
Try searching eBay for "Supermicro P3TD*" ... 320096928275 looks interesting.

I've run several 1U Supermicros with a 370DER+, and found them quite durable/stable.
 
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Yes and No ... ;)

PCI-X is a 64bit slot at 133MHz (or better) ... many of the PIII boards have PCI 64bit slots at 66MHz.
 
So could I use something like the highpoint 2220 in one of those slots? (and without too much of a slowdown?)
 
Yes, you can. It'd be four times as fast as a normal PCI slot, as a matter of fact - 64/66 instead of 32/33.

The Intel STL2 boards (of which there are a plethora right now) should work fine with modern hardware for the rest of the box. The sticking point is power; the STL2 has three power connections, and two of them are apparently optional:
power-connections.png

but when I was in the market for a dual p3, I passed on this board for this reason. I hadn't found that particular manual at that point, though; perhaps if I was building today I'd reconsider.

Two 64-bit PCI slots is probably the minimum you should consider; that's enough for a gigabit ethernet card like this (<3 intel :D). Two ports are better than one, if you want to use this in a firewall role (which isn't a bad idea, since it'll be on all the time anyways.
 
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I run an athlon xp as my fileserver, and I find that it is decent for my "home" use, which means that at most there are 3 clients, and usually one 1 is doing any heavy work on the server's disks. I use this for basically everything you listed: videos, music, mythtv storage, general file storage. I am running RAID-10 in software, but I think the bus limitations should be the same. I do not have PCI-X though, everything is on the same PCI bus. You might be way better off because of that. I am definitely hitting the limits of the PCI bus - I can't saturate the gigE and a 4-disk SATA array has a max read speed of about 62MB/s. I expect I will see a noticeable increase in throughput when I upgrade to C2D. That said, the upgrade to C2D is mostly just an excuse for a project not something that I need to do. (read as: the fileserver really isn't doing all it could folding. ;)) For serving media, and as general purpose network storage, use you probably don't need to upgrade the PC, but if you want it to be as fast as it can be you will need want to get rid of 33MHz PCI. Have you considered going to Brisbane? You can get a decent motherboard and 3600 for < $200.
 
I just realized that the case that im looking at getting doesn't support such a large motherboard, so I'll probably just go with a pci-express card and a more consumer grade motherboard. I'm thinking of using the highpoint 2320, but reviews on newegg say that it has poor performance with more than four drives. Any other suggestions for a different board at a similar price?
 
Rakinos said:
I just realized that the case that im looking at getting doesn't support such a large motherboard
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You could look at a slightly more expensive case: this, for example. It's just four inches deeper and holds EATX 12x13" boards fine.
Rakinos said:
so I'll probably just go with a pci-express card and a more consumer grade motherboard. I'm thinking of using the highpoint 2320, but reviews on newegg say that it has poor performance with more than four drives. Any other suggestions for a different board at a similar price?
Click to expand...
I make it a habit to completely ignore Newegg reviews. Many people buy stuff from Newegg, and not many know what they're doing with it, and those who don't sometimes blame the problems on the hardware or the wrong piece of hardware. Several people here on [H] are running them without problems.
 
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