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PostPosted: Sat Jul 21, 2007 6:22 pm 
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Location: Newcastle
Hi there
I've just managed to get hold of an Acer LSI Megaraid SATA 8 port RAID card at a pretty good price, which im planning to put into a DFI Pentium M board which has a PCI-X slot. I have a few questions before i start shelling out for drives etc.
1. Is this an OEM card like the Dell variants and likely to have a different firmware to a bog standard lSI Logic card?
2, Has anyone found any hard driveswhich are incompatible with this card? - i would like to find out before i go out and spend a lot on 4 or 5 drives.
3. I know it's possible to increase the capacity by adding more drives later, but can you do it and still keep the existing data intact?
4. If i do add additional drives later, do i need to keep them the same model as the existing ones.
5. I've seen another identical card for sale. Is it worth having a spare or are they fairly reliable. i don't want to be in a situation where the card fails and i can't get another and lose all my data (I am pretty fastidious about backing up irreplacebale stuff to DVD, but as my server capacity increases it's becoming a bit harder to keep on top of it)
6. What BIOS settings would you recommend i.e. stripe size etc. for RAID 5
7. Finally what size power supply would you advise for a 4 to 5 hard drive setup. The Pentium M setup is pretty low power and the board has onboard graphics.

Sorry if these have been answered elsewhere, but i have done a few searches and couldn't find conclusive answers.

Thanks in advance


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PostPosted: Sun Jul 22, 2007 4:35 pm 
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Location: Scotland
1. Probably;
2. My LSI Megaraid i4 (Dell 9K646) initially only "saw" 137GB (128GiB) however this was cured with a firmware flash using the latest LSI firmware;
3. Probably, however you would have to do it in a Linux or Windows environment - NASLite will not do it;
4. Not really, but basic parameters like RPM, cache, interface speed should be consistent;
5. Probably - how paranoid are you? ;);
6. I suggest you go reading. My 3Ware 7500-8 only allows 64kB stripe in RAID5 and I use 128kB on my Adaptec 2610SA;
7. I use http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp when assessing power requirements. I am using an Akasa 500W unit in my server at present with an AMD X2 3600+, 4 sticks 512MB DDR2, Intel gbit PCI NIC; 2 x RAID cards; 3 x 120mm fans; 3 x 92mm fans; 4 x IDE HDD; 6 x SATA HDD.


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:41 am 
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Cheers NickC

Wow that's a lot of fans!! What sort of temperatures are your drives at? And what 'wor lass' would be asking is how loud is it?

Thanks again for taking the time to reply.


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 7:53 am 
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Not too loud at all - 1 x 120mm + 2 x 92mm are Antec Tricool's set at low; 2 x 120mm are on the front of my Coolermaster 4-3.5"-HDD-into-3-5.25"-bay-cages and are very quiet. The remaining 92mm is another Antec on a fan controller wound down to about 7V.

I don't know about drive temperatures as they're all hanging off the RAID cards and there's no SMART passthrough. Not too hot though according to my calibrated fingertips!


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:49 pm 
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I did wonder about getting SMART data from the RAID card. Do you get anything at all particularly warnings about drives starting to fail?


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PostPosted: Mon Jul 23, 2007 4:51 pm 
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Only when you boot - but I shutdown every night as this is a home server rather than a business unit. I have learned to watch the boot process carefully to avoid unnecessary rebuilding (the 2610SA is prone to "losing" drives when the server is warm booted rather than switched off and on).


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PostPosted: Wed Jul 25, 2007 6:31 pm 
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Do you not find it a bit of a chew having to start it up every time you need to use it? How long does it take to boot?


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PostPosted: Thu Jul 26, 2007 8:37 am 
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Only about 2 / 3 minutes - not really that much longer than my MCE 2005 machine takes (grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr........... :shock: ). If, however, one of the drives has to undergo a periodic check (every 20 boots on average), it may take an hour - not bad for ensuring disk health.


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PostPosted: Sat Jul 28, 2007 3:34 am 
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Joined: Mon Apr 17, 2006 12:55 pm
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Location: Newcastle
Might start shutting mine down every night - see if it cuts the leccy bills!!
Especially as i'll have double the number of hard drives once i get the RAID card installed.
Thanks for the advice.

Colin


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