Does this board exist...?

[rahvin]

Ok I've been looking unsuccessfully for a Dual Socket 940 board that supports:

8 Port SATA (explained in 1 below) -
AGP Port
5-6 PCI Slots

(1)not connected on the 33bit PCI bus, needs to be on a seperate HT bus so that the transfer accross channels doesn't saturate and kill the PCI bus, I want to run a 8 drive linux software raid array on this and don't want the writes and parity caculations killing the PCI bus dead.

OR

4 Port SATA
AGP
1-2 PCI-X (preferably on it's own HT bus)
4+ PCI 32bit/33mhz

I can't find the first choice, and I don't think they make a board with PCI-X that has only one or two and the rest are PCI. I can find the board that meets the second criteria if I use dual xeon but I'm not using xeons unless someone gives them to me for free.

So does anyone know of a board that meets these specs, I think I've spent a dozen hours on research and I'd like to know if I'm chasing a pipe dream or if there is a specality manufacturer out there that makes what I'm looking for.

 

[rahvin]

^bump?

 

[jose]

No, to answer your question.

Look at the Tyan Tiger & Thunder K8W . Add a 4-8port sata controller. (3Ware or LSI) That will probably be the closest to your requirements.

Also why an 8 drive software raid ? You want to slow down the cpu for some reason ?

Regards,
Jose

 

[imported_Kensai]

The second one probably exists somewhere, but the first one is just crazy.

 

[rahvin]

Originally posted by: jose
No, to answer your question.

Look at the Tyan Tiger & Thunder K8W . Add a 4-8port sata controller. (3Ware or LSI) That will probably be the closest to your requirements.

Also why an 8 drive software raid ? You want to slow down the cpu for some reason ?

Regards,
Jose

Ok I don't want hardware raid, I don't want to tie myself to a card that can fail, Linux Raid is far more flexible. Second the parity calculations in a dual opteron system are going to be insignificant. But the reads and writes across the PCI bus if the bus is only 32bit/33mhz is going to saturate the bus and make the use of other peripheral cards that need bandwidth unreliable.

I might be willing to dump the cash on a SATA controller that goes into a PCI-X port but the probelm is all the boards that have PCI have 3-4 of them and maybe 1 or 2 normal PCI slots and you can't put a normal PCI card in a PCI-X slot. So I want either a board with 8 Ports of SATA on it's own HT leg or I want a board with 1-2 PCI-X, 1 AGP and the rest as normal PCI.

I'm asking because I have checked all the major MB manufacturers and I was wondering if anyone knew of any specialty manfacturers that offered what I'm looking for.

Damn Supermicro and their Intel only stance.

 

[rahvin]

Originally posted by: Kensai
The second one probably exists somewhere, but the first one is just crazy.

The first one exists, they just stapled the SATA controllers onto the PCI bus instead of putting them on a seperate HT leg.

 

[Peter]

Yes you can put normal PCI cards into PCI-X slots - as long as the cards are compatible to 3.3V signalling. You recognize those from their having two key notches in the connector blade.

 

[jose]

What components exactly do you want ?
The only thing you list is 8 sata ports, agp & pci.

If you want the 8 sata hd's to be off the pci slot then you have to get a pci-x mobo & controller.

There is the new K8WE but that's a pci-e mobo. So the Tiger K8W doesn't have pci-x and the Thunder K8W has only one pci slot. You could put a normal pci card in the 100mhz pci-x slot but you will then slow down that bus.

I just put together a Thunder K8W (agp) w/ a LSI 8port sata 133mhz controller w/ 8 - wd 250g raid edition drives. It is very fast.

As far as a quality raid controller (3Ware or LSI), anything can fail. Memory, CPU, motherboards all fail occasionally. You can even corrupt you file system if your lucky enough.

Will you be using ECC memory ? There's the chance you could have a bit switch state if your not. The point is software raid is not any more resilliant to corruption than a hardware
controller. I still have 10+ yrs computers fully functional, the only reason there not is use is because they are too slow.

Regards,
Jose

 

[rahvin]

My aversion to hardware raid is that if the card dies I lose the raid array. If I use generic linux software raid I'm not dependent on a piece of hardware to maintain the raid array. I also want to use the box as a future mythTV box with potentially multiple cards recording at the same time. If I do that and run the software raid over the PCI bus I'm going to saturate the bus and end up with dropped frames on the recordings.

At this point I'm just trying to spec out the system, I have selected a supermicro rackmount case that has a builtin SATA backplane that holds 8 drives and allows hotswapping. The next trick is find the MB that supports what I need but I can't seem to find it. I guess I'm going to have to decide if I should run hardware raid and risk losing the array if the card fails down the road and I can't get a replacement. The problem is if I do get hardware raid I need lots of PCI slots for the TV cards and all the motherboards that include a PCI-X slot rarely have more than 2 normal PCI slots. And therin lies my dilema, I need ~4 PCI slots and want a dual 940 system but I also need high bandwidth for the raid array.

Given what Peter posted though I'm going to have to do some looking and see if there are TV cards that support 3.3V, if that's true I may be able to do what I want with a 64bit SATA controller although that's less than ideal.

 

[jose]

Well, say you went w/ the Thunder K8W. it has 1 pci, 2 (100/133) pci-x & 2 (100/66) pci-x slots.

If you used both 66 pci-x slots & the single 33bit pci slot, that only leaves you room for 3 capture cards. If you put a capture card in the 100/133 slot then you'll knock down that bus to
33mhz. Then you no better off than a regular pc, because you'll loose the major advantage of pci-x which is thru put..

Just as well get a DFI NF4 SLI-DR is has 4 NF4 sata & 4 Promise sata ports.
http://www2.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813136157

I'd get a dual core processor w/ 2 - 1gig memory sticks. ($305 patriot 2 x 1gig dimms)

Regards,
Jose

 

[Peter]

You need multichannel videograbber cards, not ridiculous-slotcount mainboards.

 

[uOpt]

Linux will handle 8 harddrives in RAID 0 and and RAID 1 just fine, I agree with the desire to do software RAID.

One poster above is confused about PCI Express (PCIe) and PCI-X.

The K8W board has AGP, PCI (32 bit 133 MHz) and PCI-X (various).
The K8WE board has two 16-lane PCIe slots, but all the other slots are PCI and PCI-X, not PCIe. Again, two PCIe x16, but no PCIe x1.

PCIe SATA cards are expensive, but PCI-X are not, last time I looked newegg had a 4-port card for $50. Obviously that will solve your problem.

Putting a standard PCI (32 bit 133 MHz0 card into any of the PCI-X busses will slow the whole bus and all cards for to PCI speed. There are three such busses on both boards, and on the K8WE you can also abuse one of the PCIe x16 slots for a PCI 1x or 8x SATA or video grabber card.

 

[rahvin]

Originally posted by: Peter
You need multichannel videograbber cards, not ridiculous-slotcount mainboards.

Show me one that doesn't cost $600, and it needs to be a tuner card as well and be supported by video 4 linux.

 

[jose]

Which raid level are you going to run ? Which multi-channel videograbber cards have you checked out ?

Also you didn't state whether you wanted agp or pci-e ? The K8WE placed their pci(32bit) right between the 2 pci-e slots.

The $600 multichannel cost doesn't seem out of line, considering what you want to accomplish. You'll be spending >$600 on Opteron processors alone & about $900 on memory plus
another $500 on a motherboard. Add another $500 for a raid controller(LSI or 3Ware) and you have attained what you need. What are your other specs ? proc., mem. etc.

here's a sample system:

K8WE $500
2 - 246's $630
4gig ecc $972
LSI or 3Ware sata raid $465
8 - 250g WD raid ed $146 ea put this in the 133mhz slot
multi-ch video cap. $600 put this in the 100mhz slot

Your at $2746 before case, video & power supply..

Regards,
Jose

 

[uOpt]

That much RAM is actually not needed for video encoding, as long as no video editing happens.

Overall I think it would be a better choice to use one (or two) el cheapo PCI TV frame grabber cards in one Celeron D 512 MB machine each and use a fileserver. Make sure that all mainboards involved have non-PCI ethernet, though.

 

[keeleysam]

Why do you _need_ AGP?

 

[rahvin]

Instead of having multiple machines I'm trying to condense functions into one machine to save money and power usage. The intent is to have the machine be a fileserver with at least a terrabyte of space on a raid 5 volume, it will also serve as a mythTV backend/frontend and provide numerous other server functions in my home (integrating with my home control system, security cameras and whole house audio). I want the processor power so that I have the ability to store the video in mpeg4. The only frame-grabber card I can find that has 4 ports on newegg is a security specific card that I can't verify has linux support and I won't buy it unless I'm sure it runs under linux. All the tuner cards are 1 tuner except for the Hauppage 500mce which has two tuners and is $200 a pop. If I could find a 4 port frame grabber that has linux support I could do what I need with just two PCI slots.

Why do you _need_ AGP?

Because I have a voodoo 3000 that has a TV out for dumping the MythTV output into my video distribution system and it's a corner cut if I don't have to buy a new video card to do that.

My purchase is at least a few months out yet, I still have work I need to accomplish before I will be ready to install the system but I'm trying to get a parts list together in advance.

 

[keeleysam]

A new pci-e card can be had with video out for less than 150 bucks.

 

[uOpt]

I don't think that even the new 2.6 GHz opteron has enough CPU power for compressing so many video streams at once, even if you do MJPEG first.

Software RAID-5 also goes on the CPU, you have to expect not more than 20-30 MB writing throughput, when the CPUs are not otherwise loaded.