From: Lee W centos-list@unassemble.co.uk

Ebay UK didn't turn up much (althought there was a few in the US). However just tried googling a bit more and I've come across a 3ware Escalade 7506-4LP for about �200.00 which supports upto 4 drives so that should be suitable for my purposes, plus it looks quite small (being a Low-Profile card) so should fit in the rack as well.

You can even take the bracket off as long as you can mechanically secure it another way.

Okay I'm getting a bit over my head now. Anyone see any problems putting 2 of these in the same machine.

3Ware has always supported up to 4 cards in a system. Just make sure the firmwares are the same for each model or expect issues with drivers.

After a few other comments I was thinking of trying 2 x RAID-1's.

Why not a 4-drive RAID-0+1? It's far better to do it on a single card.

Unless you are thinking of (2) RAID-1, each on their own PCI-X channel, and then a RAID-0 LVM2 stripe across them?

In reality, you're really gotta get up to 8 drives in RAID-0+1 before you're going to saturate the 0.5GBps 64-bit @ 66MHz PCI bus.

And in all the 1U systems I've seen, I've only seen a maximum of (2) PCI-X channels. You'll want to use one dedicated to your NIC.

-- Bryan J. Smith mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org