[CentOS] PCI-X/PCIe RAID controller.

[Christopher Chan]

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.