[mythtv-users] Building new MythTV system, hardware help

[Scott Alfter]

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matthew.garman at gmail.com wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 08:07:08PM +0000, Robin Hill wrote:
>>Fortunately the 3ware cards work perfectly well in 32-bit PCI
>>slots (though obviously at a lower speed).  As you say, 64-bit PCI
>>is rather expensive to get hold of :(
> 
> Just for clarification: you're using the 64-bit 3ware PCI cards in
> "affordable" 32-bit PCI slots, right?
> 
> Is this something you can do, in general, with all 64-bit PCI cards?
> Or is this an extra feature of the 3ware cards?

Not all of them.  I tried using one of these lately:

http://www.lsilogic.com/products/megaraid/sata_300_8x.html

It will only fit in a 64-bit slot.  It's keyed so that it will not fit in a
32-bit slot.

I replaced it with one of these that we had as excess from another project:

http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?sess=no&prodkey=AAR-21610SA

This has worked OK for us in 32-bit slots; the biggest limitation is that it
won't create volumes larger than 2 TB.  My most recent project (a Linux-based
security DVR that captures video and audio with a PVR-150) only needed 1.1 TB,
but if you plan on creating >2-TB volumes, you might look into this:

http://www.areca.com.tw/products/html/pcix-sata.htm

We've rolled out servers with 5.4-TB RAID-5 arrays with this.  Those particular
systems were deployed with Windows on them, but I had an AMD64 Gentoo install
on a USB disk for testing purposes that worked with it.

(All numbers are real terabytes, not salesman's terabytes.  The 1.1-TB RAID-5
array is four "400-GB" Seagate SATA drives, while the 5.4-TB array is 16 of the
same drives.)

  _/_
 / v \ Scott Alfter
(IIGS( http://alfter.us/            Top-posting!
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