[mythtv-users] gt 240, fanless card .. issues

[Ben Kamen]

Check out this one review:


>
>     white Reviewed By: on 12/5/2008
>     Rating + 4
>     Tech Level Tech Level: high - Ownership: 1 day to 1 week
>     This user purchased this item from Newegg
>
>     Pros: Cheap external drive solution.
>     Works as advertised, no compatibility issues with 1.5TB Seagate drives.
>     Cons: This is not hardware RAID. PCI-E x1 limits transfer speeds somewhat.
>     Cages feel a bit shoddy. Rails are made of cheap plastic.
>     Other Thoughts: As mentioned above, the 1x PCI-E version 1 card included with this has a max transfer rate of 250MB/s. Therefore, reads from the array will not exceed that speed. Also, since this is software raid, parity/mirror needs to be written by the host OS. That will limit actual write speeds to about 125MB/s for mirroring and something around 167-200MB/s for RAID-5 (250MB/s * (n-1)/n where n is the number of drives in the RAID-5).
>
>     Max transfer rate for eSATA is 300MB/s though so it isn't a huge deal. This is for storage, not for speed.
>
>     I have this connected to a Linux host. Since there is no software program for the RAID card in linux, I had to set up software mdraid on the drives. There were no issues getting the drives to all show up on the Linux host though.