Asus A7V880 somewhat sucessfull

[MortenSchmidt]

Just thought I would add a short note that I have been using this old spare Asus A7V880 mobo for my first unraid setup. Have been using it for a couple of months now, it holds 4 2TB, 1 1TB and 1 750GB drives connected to a promise S150 TX4 and a Silicon Image 3114 based PCI card. The two on-board SATA ports worked with a couple of 300GB drives but not with the 2TB drives.

 

I transfered data to fill all the drives and performed at least 5 full parity checks and never got any errors or kernel panic. All in all pretty good for an old hack based on a chipset not yet mentioned in the hardware compatibility page.

 

I'm upgrading it to new hardware now, the PCI based controllers are no speed deamons and I look forward to getting a ICH9R / PCI-E setup. Parity check with the mentioned drives in this mobo takes roughly 25 hours. Read speeds over gigabit lan with <1ms pings have been pegging in at ~19% utilization (looking on the network tab of task manager on Win XP).

[BW]

Hi!

 

Where did you get the silicon image? I am thinking to get 1 for my server since ebay price is so cheap but kinda nervous.

 

I am looking for PCI-E card to but they are still expensive.

 

Is the PCI card significant slower that your onboard sata?

 

BW

[gajnii.nii3]

Yes,sucessfull i think.

[MortenSchmidt]

Hi!

 

Where did you get the silicon image? I am thinking to get 1 for my server since ebay price is so cheap but kinda nervous.

 

I am looking for PCI-E card to but they are still expensive.

 

Is the PCI card significant slower that your onboard sata?

   

BW

 

I got that SI card at newegg.ca, I think.

 

Benchmarking with the onboard SATA doesn't make a lot of sense since the onboard is only two ports. What really slows the PCI card down is running 4 or 6 disks on the PCI bus. If understood it correctly, the PCI bus has 133MB/s bandwidth shared between all the pci cards in that system. So parity checks will be slow, but just reading/writing one disk is somewhat respectable. The preclear_disk script runs at up to 85MB/s on the SI pci-card for example.