cmkrnl

In April 1998, in a fit of madness I dropped 700 odd UK pounds on a massive 9GB Seagate Cheetah spinning at 10k RPM. It was the fastest disk money could buy at time, but it was noisy. FF to 3 years later and needing cheap storage, was surprised to find that in the meantime a 40GB WD IDE drive could and did own it in terms of performance. Greg

In April 1998, in a fit of madness I dropped 700 odd UK pounds on a massive 9GB Seagate Cheetah spinning at 10k RPM. It was the fastest disk money could buy at time, but it was noisy. FF to 3 years later and needing cheap storage, was surprised to find that in the meantime a 40GB WD IDE drive could and did own it in terms of performance. Greg

I've been running a 320-2e just fine with a single MAU for over 12 months now. IIRC, you need to create a single disk raid0 volume (I know, sounds counter intuitive) in the controllers firmware. It'll then present the disk to the OS. Greg

Try the LSI drivers. If you trawl the forums on www.2cpu.com , there are 'tweaked' 2k3 drivers there which have the INF patched to permit install under XP. It's what I used here to make a 4e/dc work under XP. Vista and 2k3 have no issues with it & work straight away. Greg

Quite true, A pair of 64 gig flash drives will bring a serious amount of IOPS to the desktop disk fest. greg

Ridiculously so. $1500 USD ball bark for 2 73 gig SAS drives + SAS controller, versus 8 73 gig raptors + a decent hardware raid controller. One would have to have more money than sense to choose option A over option B. greg

How long are they on the market ? It's the 2nd PCI-E HBA I've seen apart from the atto one which is 2-4 times the price. greg

I have a multiboot system here, with a dedicated 75 gig raptor 150 for operating systems. 300 gig dm10 for data 36 gig mau for "program files", temp and browser caches. I have incrementally installed the vista betas on a clean raptor partition since last spring, I bought the 4e/dc from the 'bay in August. Booted the vista build I was running at the time and it found the controller & attached MAU just fine. Several DVD booted clean reinstalls from later Vista builds since then have found it also. No driver loading required. Once I get the RTM code down, It'll be installed as a test build on a clean partition too. greg

Dunno about a clean install, I have vista running here with a single MAU hung off one, using the stock drivers which shipped with Vista. greg OK so I guess you have upgraded to Vista right under XP, have you ? I have just got the X64 version of vista. I will try with signed Win 2003 Server X64 drivers from LSI tonight and I will keep you posted Thanks Nope, clean 32 bit vista installation which is running along side my normal XP one. The upgrade will not happen until sometime in 2007, need to be sure that all my software works properly under it 1st. How much memory do you have ? Seriously, the only reason to run 64 bit xp or Vista is if you have over 3.5 gig of ram and need every last byte of it. greg

Dunno about a clean install, I have vista running here with a single MAU hung off one, using the stock drivers which shipped with Vista. greg

You have 3 spindles, Put the apps on the largest fastest disk. That will make best use of the free space available. Take the other two, put the OS on one, Swap, temp, scratch space on the other. greg

This has been discussed to death in the 2cpu 'storage' http://forums.2cpu.com/forumdisplay.php?f=26 discussion forum, There is only one PCI-E scsi HBA I know of, Atto's UL5D. It also costs a shedload. You can get a LSI Logic 320-2e (or it's badge engineered Intel/Dell version) PCI-E U320 raid controller from the 'bay at a reasonable price, Mine cost 65 UKPs and is running just dandy in an Ultra-D. Parallel PCI doesnt scale due to high frequency signalling issues combined with bus width limitations on a shared bus architecture, the fastest version of PCI-X only delivers the equivalent of 4-5 PCI-E lanes. Greg

The new laptop drives based on NAND flash memory would meet all of the above and the price point. greg

A.N other vote for the P180 here, a MAU, Raptor and DM10 are pretty much inaudible in mine with them mounted on grommets. greg

Best conroe overclocking motherboard out there ATM, PCI-X is a bonus :-). Check out the forums on http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/index.php for further feedback. I recently picked up a very cheap Dell PERC 4e/dc from ebay and am running it fine in the spare SLI slot of a DFI Ultra-D at 2x PCI-E. If I hadn't done an AMD X2 heart xplant this time last year, This Asus board + a E6600 conroe would be what I'd buy today. greg