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On 8/4/07, GyroTech <gyrotech[at]freakinabox.com> wrote: <br><font color="#660066">> I was looking at forking out for a dual Opteron setup, but since these <br>> Core 2 Duos have come out they seem to be able to handle a fair grunt.
<br>> So, has anyone worked with either\both setups care to give me an honest <br>> opinion on what they would do. Obviously the Intel chips and lower power <br>> and price on their side, but Opterons have the increased bus bandwidth
<br>> (which helps greatly in the transcoding) and redundancy on their side.<br><br>I'll throw my hat into the ring. I don't have exactly the system I'm recommending but mine won't work for you due to the requirement of 4 pci slots. I am using backend only Asus P5W DH deluxe and a Intel E2160 core 2 duo processor (undervolted). This server also does my mail system, torrenting, usenet downloads and ftp/web serving.
<br><br>I would recommend this hardware for you due to a combination of reasons:<br>Motherboard: </font></font></font>GIGABYTE GA-M61P-S3 Socket AM2 - 4 pci slots, 2 x1 pci-e slots and a pci-e x16 slot (usable at x8 for other cards) along with a built in geforce 6100 among other things. Very nice board.
<br>Processor: I'd go with the AMD be-2300 due to it only using 45 watts of power and performing between a 3800+x2 and a 4400+x2. Cost of about eighty five dollars. Or you could go with a 3600+x2 for sixty five dollars but it will cost you more in the long run if it's always on due to long term power costs.
<br><br>I've got two software raids of 5 sata 2 drives at the moment. The way I would go about using that motherboard with software raid would be to get a single pci-e x1 sata 2 Silicon image chipset card that has 2 channels. Then use a 5 port - Sata port multiplier of these types:
<br><pre>PMP support is tested with the following controllers.<br><br>* Silicon Image 3124 (1095:3124)<br>* Silicon Image 3132 (1095:3132)<br>* Intel ICH9R (8086:2922)<br>* JMicron JMB360 (197b:2360)<br>* JMicron JMB363 (197b:2363)
<br><br>With the following Port Multipliers.<br><br>* Silicon Image 3726 (1095:3726)<br>* Silicon Image 4726 (1095:4726)<br>* Silicon Image 5744 (1095:5744)</pre>Information on port multiplier patch for current linux kernel is here:
<a href="http://home-tj.org/wiki/index.php/Libata-tj-stable">http://home-tj.org/wiki/index.php/Libata-tj-stable</a><br><br>I have two silicon image 3132s, and a Jmicron JMB360 along with two addonics internal port multipliers. Cost of port multiplier and pci-e x1 sata 2 channel card = around a hundred dollars. Maximum speed through pci-3 x1 interface is 250MB/s.
<br>WIth linux software raid you can do online capacity expansion. I've done this about 5 times now and added the entry on how to do it to the myth raid wiki. I use xfs and it can take anywhere from 3 to 8 hours for a drive to be fully added to a raid 5 array.
<br>Now with the motherboard above and using port multipliers and multiple pci-e sata 2 cards you have expandability of greater than 80 drives. Each x1 card is two channel and can handle two port multipliers. Also on the x16 slot you could put a x4 or greater pci-e card in there that supports port mulipliers and have 4 (largest one I've seen currently that has those chipsets above) or more available channels for even more port multipliers. :)
<br><br>Using the xfs file system and chunk sizes of 256KB the speeds on the raid arrays around 100MB/s burst and between 60-80MB/s sustained for the array made up of 500GB seagate 7200.10s. Also it can handle so far up to 4 HD streams (mythtv multirec branch) an sd stream and real time commflagging and serve two frontends at the same time.
<br>I'll be updating my user page with new information/pictures hopefully when I can find some time this week. <br><a href="http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:Blackoper">http://mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/User:Blackoper
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