[snip]
Highpoint has some reasonable RAID and multiport IDE and SATA cards, and I?d bet the 18x0 series would be a good shot, since I already work with them. It?s natively supported by FreeBSD 5.4, and has additional support from Highpoint, what I consider a great thing, specially for management features. But if you?re going with 1820, I suggest you to get a 1820A, ?cause it has an onboard XOR processor which speeds up things a bit AND frees some CPU usage on RAID5 (important on not-so-new CPUs). ;). However, if you don?t need RAID5, there are other options from Highpoint itself, but I don?t have a clue about prices. I would only not suggest vinum on RAID5 unless you have a really good machine (at least hyperthreaded), because it drains quite a bit from the CPU, but if it?s for personal use, or a low-end server, that could fit.
Actually, you are correct about the 1820A, I made a typographical mistake... I do have an 1820A, and the reason I chose that over the standard 1820 was the onboard processor. Sorry about the confusion.
[snip]
In a last thought, speed will greately depend on the hardware you?re using (mobo, CPU, disks etc.), but they?re indeed quite good. I really hadn?t noticed the backwards compatibility in the specs, but it?s a nice feature - you?ll really like it if someday you can afford a 64bit, 133MHz motherboard. :) And, as for reliability, i have two 1820A running rock-solid, 24/7, beside me, on 2 HP ML110 machines. It?s too early to say, since it hasn?t been yet 6 months, but we haven?t had a single issue, even when we decided to play with hot-swap. :)Have luck,
Good luck with your set, I'm already very impressed with the performance of it (for the price), and I do plan on upgrading to a newer board/CPU one of these days. My problem is that I can't just throw something out if it still works, so I try to make use of it until it dies, and then I can justify buying something new (however, by the time this board dies, I'll most likely have inherited some other slightly newer still working board without 64-bit PCI, and I'll be forced to use that until it dies... :) ). That's the primary reason I went with this board, that it would work in what I already have, and should work for a time to come with whatever I do end up getting.
I did splurge on a new Dual Xeon setup which will be for video encoding, but I have a SCSI subsystem for that machine, and I needed the horsepower.
Tulio G. da Silva
-Gary
_______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hardware To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
