hardware for home use large storage

[Matthew Dillon]

:Correction -- more than likely on a consumer motherboard you *will not*
:be able to put a non-VGA card into the PCIe x16 slot.  I have numerous
:Asus and Gigabyte motherboards which only accept graphics cards in their
:PCIe x16 slots; this """feature""" is documented in user manuals.  I
:don't know how/why these companies chose to do this, but whatever.
:
:I would strongly advocate that the OP (who has stated he's focusing on
:stability and reliability over speed) purchase a server motherboard that
:has a PCIe x8 slot on it and/or server chassis (usually best to buy both
:of these things from the same vendor) and be done with it.
:
:-- 
:| Jeremy Chadwick                                   jdc at parodius.com |

    It is possible this is related to the way Intel on-board graphics
    work in recent chipsets.  e.g. i915 or i925 chipsets.  The
    on-motherboard video uses a 16-lane internal PCI-e connection which
    is SHARED with the 16-lane PCI-e slot.  If you plug something into
    the slot (e.g. a graphics card), it disables the on-motherboard
    video.  I'm not sure if the BIOS can still boot if you plug something
    other than a video card into these MBs and no video at all is available.
    Presumably it should be able to, you just wouldn't have any video at
    all.

    Insofar as I know AMD-based MBs with on-board video don't have this
    issue, though it should also be noted that AMD-based MBs tend to be
    about 6-8 months behind Intel ones in terms of features.

						-Matt