PCI-X / PCI slot for raid card..

deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
edited December 2006 in Hardware
I've been looking at various solutions for my ongoing storage woes and I think my best bet is a dedicated SATA Raid card. I thought I'd have to buy a new motherboard since all the cards I've looked at are either PCI-X or PCI-E, my 'server' only has PCI slots. But I was looking through EBay and I saw this beauty:

Ebay link

which says it supports PCI-X and PCI. I'm guessing I won't see the same performance with standard PCI but as long as it works.... anyway, does this mean that all PCI-X cards are backwards compatible with PCI slots? Or is it a unique feature of this card?

Comments

  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited March 2006
    "Please Note: This will not fit in a PCI-E (PCI-Express) slot"

    i suggest a Highpoint or an Areca raid controller. myself and DragonV8 both have Areca cards and they are very nice. i belive he uses a 1220, and i use a 1230.

    How many drives are you looking to hook up to this array?

    1220 8 port http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816131004
    1230 12 port http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816131006

    highpoint 4 port http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816115027
    highpoint 8 port
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816115026
  • deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
    edited March 2006
    Yeah, the areca cards are nice, but a bit pricey and I've been warned off the highpoint cards. I think I've confused you somewhat with my PCI / PCI-X / PCI-E talk. The card I linked to says it's for PCI-X (64bit) but it will work in standard PCI slots. Which is what I want, I just wanted to know if that's accurate (ie: are PCI-X cards backwards compatible) and if there's a massive performance hit using a PCI-X card in a standard PCI slot. The solution I'm veering towards now is getting a cheap server from EBay that has PCI-X slots and putting a card in there. My options are:

    PCI-E card: would require new motherboard, CPU etc... best performance but pricey

    PCI-X card: would go in an old server, probably low performance but very cheap.

    PCI: this is what I want information on, not sure how performace would be, cheapest option.

    my favoured option is option 3, since I have a board with free PCI slots in my 'server' already. Option 2 is another cheap option since I can get a server from Ebay with a blisteringly fast PIII-700 and those all important PCI-X slots for about £50, but I doubt it will perform very well. Option 1 is my best bet for performance, but I really don't want to shell out that kind of money.

    Just for some more info: I currently have 2 300GB SATA drives in RAID 0, connected to the onboard ports on my ABIT-KV7 board. What I want to do is create an expandable solution capable of holding at least 900GB (the 600 I already have plus another 300GB disk), with some kind of data protection (RAID 5?) and the capacity to add more drives in the future. So I need something that will allow me to setup a 600GB array, copy all my data to it, then add the original 2*300GB drives and end up with a RAID 5 array of 3*300GB data drives and 1*300GB hot swap (or whatever it is in RAID 5) drive which will allow me to add more drives to the array as I go along.
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited March 2006
    if you want to be able to expand the array on the fly i can almost garentee that normal PCI cards will not do that. let alone a normal PCI that will do SATA raid 5. online raid expansion like you are talking about is kinda expensive little feature because not all of them can do it. You can kinda kiss the "below $250 range" good bye with online expansion. what IS possible is to buy maybe 2 cheaper cards that support raid 5 and have 2 arrays, or migrate to/from array to array. i cant speak from experiance of the highpoint cards, but i do have a friend that has 2 8 port cards in 1 machine. he speaks highly of them.

    PCI-X seems to be the way to go for you. There also appears to be more than one version of PCI-X the standard now seems to be PCI-X 2.2.

    Tex is the resident raid guru here on the forums, but i think his choice of cards is 3Ware, or Promise i may be mistaken. The cheapest 3Ware card newegg carries that is PCI-X, Raid 5, SATA and online expansion is

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816116025
  • deicistdeicist Manchester, UK
    edited March 2006
    It's looking like the only reasonably priced card that supports online capacity expansion and online RAID level migration is this one:

    Highpoint RocketRaid 2220

    Tex warned me away from the highpoint cards, but it's about half the price of any other card that does what I want it to.
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited March 2006
    just please read reviews on it before making a choice.
  • JavisJavis
    edited December 2006
    Hi there folks

    I would really appreciate if someone could help me out on a related issue. Sorry it's slightly off topic.

    I also have no PCI-Express slots on my motherboard either. I am trying to buy a SATA drive now, so that if I upgrade my PC, I can just transfer the harddrive. So I'll buy a PCI controller to at least get the thing working.

    I downloaded PCI Sniffer, which gave me a report showing every bus device with the following: Cacheline: 0 * 32 bit.
    There were no 64bits.
    I believe v2.1, 5V Conventional PCI is 32bits, whereas v2.2, 3.3V Conventional PCI is 64bits.

    Question: Am I correct in assuming that all my PCI slots are therefore v2.1
    Question: Am I correct in assuming any PCI cards I buy must be v2.1 compliant
    Question: Finally, can anyone please identify the slot in the attached picture, and what it would be used for. It doesn't look like any I'm familiar with.

    Thanks
    Javis
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