Support for affordable S-ATA RAID controllers (xs4)

[Brent Wiese]

> The 3ware cards are quite expensive, according to the pricing 
> lists I've
> seen so far. I wonder if the 8506-card mentioned in another post also
> works in 32bit PCI slots. Otherwise, I'd need a Xeon board. But that's
> another post in the thread.

3Ware cards are expensive, but you get what you pay for. Whatever code they
have to optimize the disk use works wonders.

I also believe the price is reasonable given its hardware RAID5.

BE AWARE however (found this out the hard way), their performance optimizing
code only works on the FIRST volume. Shouldn't be an issue with a 4-6 port
card, but when you use 200gb+ drives on a 12 port card, you end up over the
2TB volume limit and the second volume is slow as molassas...

Cheers,
Brent