On Saturday, April 09, 2011 10:47 PM, Drew wrote:
The key is the backplane, not the drives. You should be able to get u320 speeds if you have enough u160 drives.
Does five drives count?
I guess that depends on whether they can flood an u320 bus. If they are 10k/15k rpm drives, I'd think so...
I was just hoping a slightly newer card might be available that'd give me a speed boost for cheap. :-)
Again, like John posted, it depends on whether your backplane(s) can feed the u320 card and whether its bus can take the bandwidth.
AFAIK, the back plane is rated at U320 speeds. The unit is a Supermicro CSE-M35S (SCA) which is listed as a U320 rated unit.
No experience with that particular unit but Supermicro has a good name. That would leave whether your mainboard's bus/slot can handle u320 speeds or not if you do get a u320 card.
Oh, another thing, if you are going to do raid5 or above, a big memory cache is king for the card. 64M of cache may or may not cut it. That Vortex with 1GB is definitely sufficient especially if it is BBU cache.