Need help finding a good 5+disk ATA Raid 5 controller

[bigshooter]

I was about to buy a SATA raid 5 controller until I a deal on a motherboard with 64bit pci fell trhough. Now I need to find a 32bit 33mhz PCI card that will do Raid 5 and support at least 5 drives. The only card that I've seen would be the Promise Supertrak SX6000, but I really want to go SATA juts to avoid the mess of parallel cables. Anybody know of a card that will work for me? I guess I could probably wait for PCI Xpress mobos to come out, and hopefully find a card that supports that.

This machine is going to be just a file server unless I decide to make it my home theater pc (just for movies and media, no games). I am only concerned about redundancy and not about saturating my pci bus or anything like that. Most likely I'm going to stick a 802.11g card on it for the time being, and put this thing in a corner somewhere where I can't hear all the damn fans.

If anyone actually reads this thread, I'm also trying to decide what kind of drives to use. The sweetspot for pricing hasn't quite hit 200 gig yet, but I already have two WD 200gig drives. If I go IDE, I might end up buying a few more just so I can have a terabyte of useable storage. If I go SATA, I'll have to go smaller to keep the costs down.

 

[cleverhandle]

3Ware has SATA RAID controllers. If you must have 5 drives then you'd have to go with the 8-port controller, which is probably pretty expensive. If you can live with four drives, the 4-port controller would be more reasonable.

 

[bigshooter]

The 3ware controllers are 64bit pci. I need 32bit.


edit: Well in case anyone was wondering, if you dig around on 3ware's site, you will find that most of their cards are compatible with 32bit pci slots in addition to 64bit.

 

[LoneWolf1]

How about LSI's MegaRAID SATA 150-6.

Newegg

 

[bigshooter]

I'm thinking of taking that route since it's about the same price as the others that support greater than 4 drives. I originally posted this thread when I thought you HAD to have a 64bit pci slot for the 64bit pci cards. Fortunately most of them seem to be backwards compatible with 32bit pci sluts.

 

[Monoman]

Originally posted by: bigshooter
I'm thinking of taking that route since it's about the same price as the others that support greater than 4 drives. I originally posted this thread when I thought you HAD to have a 64bit pci slot for the 64bit pci cards. Fortunately most of them seem to be backwards compatible with 32bit pci sluts.

I laughed when I read this and I had to share it!!!

thanks for the laugh!

 

[bigshooter]

lol... hehe... who put that u by the o.