Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with PCI-X

New SCSI card is hiding the old SCSI card-thus hiding the RAIDed system drives. Help!

bartleby — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:31:42 -0800

RAID HBA help sought: Server has its internal drives RAID'ed by an internal RAID card. I am trying to add another SCSI HBA card so I can hook up a nifty external SCSI-to-SATA RAID DAS tower. Problem is, however I install the new HBA, it "hides" the existing internal RAID card, meaning that the server doesn't find its own internal drives and can't boot. What to do? Very technical question, and I'm posting it elsewhere, but I often get my best andswer from MeFi.

I have a few ideas, but unfortunately this is a production machine with no failover/parallel device; so taking it down to experiment is a problem. (I also don't want to end up rebuilding the internal RAID.) Hoping to get some ideas to eliminate trials/errors.

IBM Xseries tower server, with an Adaptec/IBM serveRAID 6i handing the RAIDing of its internal drives.

Trying to add a PCI-to-SCSI HBA made by LSI, the 22320-R, to use ONLY as a pass-through to get a SCSI hookup outside the server itself to an external SCSI-to-SATA tower that has its own RAID controller. All I need the LSI card to do is get me an external SCSI port.

Problem is, when installed in any of the PCI slots, the new LSI card takes over and is the only visible SCSI controller; it's somehow taking priority or disabling the internal SCSI RAID controller that handles the internal system and data drives.

Tried already:
1) Disable boot in the LSI card's BIOS, for one or both channels;
still doesn't see any other controllers or drives - "no system disk"
2) SCSI adapters will come up in order of their ID;
making the internal ID 0 and the external ID 1 does nothing niether does doing it the other way.
3) SCSI adapters will come up in order of their ID;
I've tried it in every PCI slot on the mobo; not only does that not fix it, but it never reports being in the slot it's actually in - put it in slot 5, it says it's in 4; put in 2 and it says it's in #3.
4) tried it in dual-channel, single-channel A, and single-channel B; all behave the same.
5) tried swapping slots with the internal card (slot#4) and mixing and matching various slot permutations: same behavior every time.

Remove the LSI card, and everything behaves as it should.
Insert the LSI card anywhere, and it obscures any other RAID controllers, regardless if I've disabled booting in the LSI

Am I missing something, or do I just have a bad card?

The X is NOT for Express!

dmd — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 14:06:46 -0800

Is there such thing as a PCI-X video card that will work in a Mac G5 tower? We need to drive 4 monitors off of this machine. It has 1 AGP slot and 3 PCI-X slots. We've bought something like 5 cards already, 4 of which were "guaranteed" (by Apple in 2 cases) to be the right one. All of them turned out to be PCI Express cards, even the ones that said PCI-X on the box.

Does there exist a video card that (a) will work in a PCI-X slot, and (b) can drive two monitors?

Help me clear up some conflicting info.

Ceci n'est pas une marionnette de chaussette — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 11:46:27 -0800

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!