Peter Arremann wrote: > On Friday 03 March 2006 10:18, David Thompson wrote: > >> Anyone have any experience with these products yet? We've got one in for >> eval, but I thought I'd also ask for experiences here... >> >> Thanks in advance. >> > > After reading the other replies, I'll guess I'll be the only one to say > something negative then... > > Got a 9550SX 4 port on a Tyan K8WE. Updated drivers, updated firmware and bios > - nothing helped. Whenever I had high IO loads the system would crash. > Eventually disabling write cache reduced the IO enough for the system to be > stable. > Interesting. I have the same motherboard in a few new test machines and we ended up going with Highpoint RocketRAID 2224 cards. We used these because they supported 4 internal drives and had a multilane/infiniband connector on the bracket for an external tank of 4 additional drives. I haven't experienced any performance problems with either the internal or external drives (Seagate 500gig SATAII all around). I did have a couple of drives that seemed to be in "popcorn popper mode" under heavy usage when NCQ was enabled so I turned it off and it went away (not really an issue for me since these boxes are just pushing around a lot of huge uncompressed video files and not doing any significant seeking). I had initially planned on going with 3Ware boards as I've had great success with them in the past, but some of our video editing folks wanted the ability to cart around shoeboxes with 2TB in them...sneakernet style. Cheers,