Help with RAID 5 controllers.

Most if not all PCI-X RAID controllers should be backwards-compatible with PCI. If you limit the search to pure PCI controllers, you'll probably be restricted to older or poorer cards. There should be greater economies of scale with PCI-X cards.

Some Athlon XP chipsets aren't noted for their PCI bus performance, so it's probably best to forget about spending a small fortune on a "pure hardware" RAID controller -- you'll be limited by the PCI bus in even the best case, often more so with an Athlon XP chipset, and even more so when you have both the storage controller and a network card on PCI (esp. gigabit -- which you should definitely have if you're at all concerned about performance here). Note that older onboard consumer GbE solutions are almost surely PCI-based.

If you don't have/want gigabit, then get anything; it won't matter much -- because the network will be the big bottleneck in any case, the access and computations coming off the drives will be limited.

I suggest re-thinking this server, and perhaps going with a new cheap build with on-board SATA RAID with an option to upgrade down the road. A ~$100 MB + a ~$70 CPU with onboard GbE, SATA RAID, and video would be cheaper than a HW storage controller, and would still stand a good chance of matching or out-performing an Athlon XP with a crowded PCI bus, and could be upgraded down the road for a higher-end storage controller, keeping it in consumer-land with a PCIe interface, and getting a good part of its performance potential.

There are a few downsides to onboard RAID. Most of these go away if you have a full backup solution, which you should in any case, regardless of how robust your solution supposedly is.

If you really insist on a PCI HW storage controller, look at Areca and AMCC/3ware, and just check for backwards compatibility with PCI as a detail.

Ok, thanks man, i didn't realise that you could use a PCI-X card in a PCI slot.

I was also planning to get a Gigabit Network card (also PCI), which i suppose would crowd the PCI bus...

I'd prefer to just use what i've got because it's there and i don't really want to spend extra cash on it.

I can get 'Promise' products straight from our suppliers, so if any of them are decent, they'd be cheaper than anything else.

This one is PCI-X, so would it work on one of my PCI slots?

PROMISE FastTrak SX4300 Serial ATA-300 PCI-X RAID Controller, Quad Channel (32MB, levels: 0, 1, 10, 5, JBOD)

How bad do you think the performance would be if I had that and the gigabit NIC on my PCI bus?

I'd rather not go software because my CPU would struggle too much.

Is the PROMISE FastTrak SX4300 a hardware RAID card or Software based like the PROMISE FastTrak SX4310?

It seems the only difference is that the 4300 has 32MB RAM onboard.

Thanks,

Paul

Hey, yeah, that would be perfect. Unfortunatelly, I can't seem to source it in South Africa at all...