12 Drives In One System!

[DoPeY5007]

Nice...


In my current I can have 12 :cheers:


On-board Regular IDE

On-board Promise ATA/66

iWill side RAID ATA/100 PCI card :P

[sbp]

:thumb:

[Jeffbx]

'course you can always drop a couple 'o SCSI cards in there & get 13 drives per card....

[MazaNaza]

Heck yes. Let's here for doing things simply for the sake of saying you did them! :D

[NuTs62]

Originally posted by chosenfool


ive been asked a million times why i do things the way i do them. and always i answer,

"cuz i can!;) ". he he!

why must you bring your system over, along with what other goodies you might be able to conjure up, to my house?

because you can! =)... and you will!



yeah i know, wishful thinking...

[NuTs62]

Originally posted by chosenfool
well, i didnt think it will work, but i guess i can now have up to 12 drives in this one system (1.3GHz P3/BE6-II) :). The regular ata33 controller (2), the Highpoint ata66 controllers (another 2), and the CMD ata100 controller card (another 2). Figure in the master/slave configuration, and voila! 12 possible drives...:drool:
Its funny how XP doesnt have a built-in driver for the highpoint ata66 controllers (an older controller), but it readily sees the CMD ata100 controller card upon boot up (no installation of drivers necessary):hmm:

http://chosenfool.homestead.com/files/8controllers.jpg

Why don't you try one of these suckers? Made by 3Ware

Escalade™ 7000 Series
Ultra ATA/100 interface
64-bit PCI technology
Support up to 8-drives through independent non-blocking switch ports
RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 and JBOD
64-bit ASIC design with fast on-board microprocessor
Hot swap and hot spare capability
Greater than 180MB/sec on reads
Greater than 127MB/sec on writes
Delivers ultimate RAID 5 performance
----
Plop one in, and BAM! you got 8 there, in addition to the 4 present on your motherboard, and if you have SCSI, even more! You thought ploppin in 3 raid cards getting 12 drives would be nice? Plop in 3 of these babies! This has been what I've been looking for. totally awesome! Now all I need to do is find some affordable 120-160GB HD's.

[NuTs62]

Originally posted by chosenfool
how much does that thing cost?:dodgy:

Well, that is the top of the line one. They also have ATA/66 ones. The retail prices are listed here http://www.3ware.com/Products/EscaladeQ1-02MSRP.pdf

Supposedly one of the easiest to install. I'm fed up with my Highpoint! All I need is to collect 'nuf money for that sucker! Accepting donations! :D

[Jack.Watson]

We're using the Escalade 6800 in 3 of our systems in a RAID 5 config - although early specs of the card states they only support RAID 0 and RAID 1, later BIOS upgrades provided RAID 5 functionality.

The environment these systems are installed into, does not require the Ultra high speed performance of SCSI, or even ATA100, we were simply looking for MASS storage - cheap. The early 6800's ran for about $350, with each 100GB drive costing us about $225, at the time. We built 3 "archive" servers, each with 700GB of usable space, for about $2200; or obtained 2TB of usable space for $6600.

I have yet to find something "Bad" with these cards, they're actually really, really, nice cards, and they've only improved them since our initial purchase. Now, the 7000 series has something like 128MB cache on board and supports ATA100, which will only improve the performance.

The cards are supported by Windows (98, Me, NT, 2000, XP) and Linux flavors of 2.2.15 and beyond. In our environment, we have 1 NT, 1 2000, and 1 Red Hat 7.1 installation.

The cards come with their own web interface which allows you to power off individual drives, replace them, add them back into to the RAID, and rebuild the RAID - all while the system is still up and running, i.e., providing hot-pluggable IDE drives. The cards support multiple online spares, so you could even have 8 drives installed with 6 in a RAID 5 config and 2 online spares for reserve - if desired. FYI, last time I checked, the web interface was only supported in Windows, Red Hat, and SuSi installations, though.

Tech support is knowledgeable, too, in both Windows and Linux. In our first installation, we had an issue with the web interface for our RH box, the tech was able to diagnose the issue right away and resolve the problem immediately.


Jack

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rm -f /bin/laden

[NuTs62]

Are you also a used car salesman on your spare time? You kinda got me sold.. NOOO! MORE MONEY! :angry:

[Ladogaboy]

Nice chosen!!! :thumb:

I'm soon going to be setting up my file server/hard drive farm, but I think I'm going to limit it to 5 drives for now. :hmm: