[sheflug] Hardware Raid + Motherboard Question (Was HD partitioningquestion)

["Wonkey Donkey" <wonkey_donkey [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well further to my last message, it seems this little job is going on hold 
right now.

Having been to the Gentoo forums, it seems like there is a problem with 
nVidia drivers and the latest xorg server. Quite a big problem to be honest, 
in that folks are having to wait until nVidia release the version 9 drivers 
before things will work properly again. (I'm not going to get into the 
stable/unstable branch discussions right now).

On the up side, with my newfound time, I've been looking at some hardware 
raid devices, and was pleasantly surprised.

Areca, 3Ware and LSIlogic have some great looking boards out there at the 
moment, raid6 is filtering through, and they are making the devices for both 
PCI-E and PCI-X. (I'm still a fan of PCI-X and won't buy a motherboard 
without it now. Full speed FW800 on my external enclosures rocks you see).

Another winning point I think, is that they are also starting to make them 
driverless too. The newly created arrays appear as a single unit to the 
system bios (which in itself isn't that new), but they also don't require a 
driver to work. Thats what I consider real hardware raid !

Now, on to my mobo question.

Does anybody have  the Asus Workstation Motherboard P5WDG2-WS ? If so, do 
you have any thoughts/recommendations ? Hardware-wise, it looks like theres 
nothing that linux wouldn't fully support.

I have had my eye on this for some time now; all the reports out there state 
that the newer revisions support conroe, and its the only half decent board 
I have seen that has full bandwidth PCI-X slots in it too. (I've often 
wondered why so many manufacturers don't include PCI-X in more of their 
mobos).

I can only dream what the performance would be like with one of the faster 
conroe chips and a decent hardware raid card too.

With a properly tweaked linux installation atop a couple of decent hard 
drives it should be nothing short of amazing.

Thats enough of my mumblings anyway; I shall return to the seats on the back 
row.

Steve. 



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