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.