anyone using an add-in PCI-E RAID card?

[bigboi]

i would like to get a new system together based on an X2 processor, and would like the ability to add a SATA RAID card like this one in the future: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131568

so i'm wondering if the pci-e slots on current SLI mobos will reliably function with 1 video card and 1 RAID card in the slots. is anyone doing this? if so, what mobo are you using?

thanks

 

[ribbon13]

thats a motherboard. and it can definately run a RAID HBA in one slot and a video card in the other because the slots are not tied to the same PCI-express lanes at alll

 

[bigboi]

whoops! yeah, that was the wrong link. sorry. do i need to make sure the slots are on different lanes in order to be sure the board will work the way i want?

thanks

 

[gaidin123]

I'd suggest reading up on the storagereview.com forums. A few people have stated that they're using add in pcie raid cards on pcie x16 or x8 slots in newer motherboards. I tried with the promise supertrak ex8350 but had no luck. Promise only bothered to test the board on mainly Intel server and workstation motherboards though...

Gaidin

 

[lumbus]

So why not use RAID on the MB?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: lumbus
So why not use RAID on the MB?

Performance, features, performance, reliability, performance, more than 4 (or 2) ports, and performance. Actually, the performance issue doesn't really come into significance until you need more than a few drives, and/or you want the very CPU-intensive RAID 5, which motherboard-integraded RAID does on your CPU rather than on a dedicated processor of its own (as the high-end add-in cards do).

 

[bigboi]

Originally posted by: lumbus
So why not use RAID on the MB?

mainly what provia fan said. i'll eventually need a large raid5 array in this box and i don't want to spend some godawful amount of money on an X2 just to have it spend 25% of it's efforts on parity calculations.

thanks for the reminder about storagereview.com. i haven't been there in a while i'll check out the forums.

 

[jewps]

I have a EX8350 in an Intel D915GAG in a x16 slot. It works just fine after working with it for a few days.

The controller has been doing great for a couple of months though I still can't get their WebPAM software going in Gentoo.. sigh