[mythtv-users] Dual Core or Dual CPU??

[Brian Wood]

On Saturday 04 August 2007 12:20, Michael Heironimus wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 02:29:32PM +0100, GyroTech wrote:
> > I'm looking to kit out a fairly beefy back-end, dealing with MythTV and
> > a file server. It's going to have a PCI-E RAID5 card in it (RocketRAID
> > seems to be a good choice there)and two, perhaps four, DVB-T tuner cards
> > in it. All the front ends will be FE-only boxes, maybe even diskless.
>
> My understanding is that none of the Highpoint cards (or other cheap
> consumer IDE/SATA RAID controllers) are hardware RAID. Most of them use
> a software driver for the actual RAID and just have a bootable BIOS that
> knows how to read the proprietary, undocumented layout they use on disk.

True. This is also the so-called "RAID" capability of most modern 
motherboards. They actually just reserve a little BIOS memory to store setup 
info for their proprietary (and generally Windows-only) software RAID 
drivers.

>
> If you want an actual hardware RAID card you should look in to the
> higher-end products from companies like LSI Logic, 3ware, or Areca. You
> get what you pay for, so be prepared to spend quite a bit on one of
> these. You probably don't really need one.

Also, most "real" hardware RAID controllers are 64-bit PCI cards, a type of 
slot not generally found in a consumer product. PCI-E is not (yet at least) a 
common commercial server interface. These cards also generally want SCSI 
drives and the mobos often want ECC registered RAM, both of which start to 
drive up the price quickly.

It's difficult for me to imagine any Myth system that would see an improvement 
over Linux software RAID by moving to a hardware RAID controller but, as is 
often said, "it probably couldn't hurt", if you have the money or the 
hardware hanging around.

-- 
BEWW