[rescue] Any Minneapolis area listers ?

[Jay Monkman]

On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 09:50:54AM -0500, Ethan O'Toole wrote:
> As far as spanning multiple cards, you would probably be better off with 4
> 4-port raid cards running software raid against them all or something,
> than one 16 port card.

That's not necessarily true. 4 drives on one card can completely
saturate a 33MHz/32 bit PCI bus. 4 drives @ 50 MB/s = 1.6Gbps. 4 of 
those will saturate a 100MHz/64 bit bus.

Even if you aren't concerned about the performance you may run into
bus timeout problems. I investigated doing the same thing a couple
years ago, and read that lots of people that tried it and failed
because they kept getting PCI bus errors.

I ended up getting a 12 port 3ware card, and haven't had a single
problem. Plus, the 3ware cards support hot swap. I don't think the
standard SATA cards do.