Help me clear up some conflicting info.

April 21, 2008 11:46 AM

Two quick computer hardware questions before I try setting up a new drive.

Ok, so I'm going to be buying some new hardware soon and I just want to clear up any confusion before I buy something I don't really want.

I'll looking to buy a PCI-X RAID controller card but I only have open basic PCI slots on my motherboard. Are PCI-X cards backwards compatible by default? My local computer store rep says no, but a geeky friend claimed yes, and the rep must have been thinking of PCI-E.

Also, I'll be putting together a 3.75TB array, but it won't be my boot disk. Will I have any problems with that under windows XP SP2? Again some folks have told me XP can't handle anything above 2TB at all, when others have said it'll be fine as long as it's not the boot disk.

So I guess both of these questions come down to the fact that I trust you, dear hive mind, more then random sales reps or computer dudes I know.

Thanks!

posted by Ceci n'est pas une marionnette de chaussette to computers & internet (2 comments total)

From a little quick Googling:

PCI-X seems to be backwards compatible with PCI 2.x ... so make sure your motherboard slots are PCI 2.x (personally, I would also make sure you've recently updated your motherboard BIOS to the most recent version)

XP SP2 should handle multi-terabyte partitions as long as you Format them NTFS. What I would do is leave the RAID not-installed. First get XP SP2 up and running smoothly with all updates (Windows Updates, motherboard chipset driver updates,etc) THEN install the RAID card and then the drives, and configure the RAID Partition.

If I'm wrong on any of this, I am happy to learn.
posted by jmnugent at 11:55 AM on April 21

I know nothing about PCI-X (my RAID card is PCI Express), but I have some other (hopefully) helpful comments. :)

I'm not sure what you're planning on getting, but I highly recommend getting real hardware RAID. This page is a pretty good (linux-slanted) reference, but is a good place to look regardless of the operating system involved.

When I was building my RAID setup, I came to the following conclusions:

1) If you're using RAID for redundancy, having a separate boot disk that will render your system useless and unbootable when it dies pretty much defeats the entire purpose. The card I chose lets you split up a RAID volume into two parts (essentially virtual volumes both contained on the same RAID set), allowing you to split off a smaller volume dedicated to the OS.

2) I wanted to go with real hardware raid--I don't want to deal with busted and/or non-existent drivers, and I wanted something that had correct write behavior. (with a battery-backed write cache)

I went with the 3ware 9650SE (the 8 port low profile variant), but I've heard good things about Areca, too.

Sorry, I also don't know anything about Windows, but maybe this is still some helpful information?
posted by darkshade at 12:17 PM on April 21