[CentOS] PCI-X/PCIe RAID controller.

Sat Apr 9 00:38:08 UTC 2011
John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com>

On 04/08/11 5:12 PM, Drew wrote:
> Afternoon,
>
> I've got an old Dell PERC 4DC (PCI 64bit/33MHz) sitting in my home rig
> and with a new board on the way that has PCI-X (133) and PCIe (x4)
> slots, I was wondering what people would recommend for a cheap
> hardware parallel SCSI RAID controller (no fake raid please) that is
> relatively cheap but faster then the old PERC? I'm looking for
> something cheap that'll do RAID-10 but bonus points if it does
> RAID-5/6. :-)


cheap scsi raid?  good luck.   maybe something on ebay, but then its 
Caveat Emptor, and likely the raid batteries will be dead or dying.

What speed is your scsi backplane?  you can't get Ultra/320 speeds 
across older backplanes that were designed for U80 or U160 speeds.  in 
fact, I've had a few backplanes that were supposed to be U320 but only 
worked reliably at U160 speeds, would get SCSI protocol errors when 
pushed under high IO loads at U320.     64bit 33Mhz PCI will sustain 
about 200MB/sec, which is about all you can get out of a single channel 
of U160 or slower SCSI anyways.