The motherboard is an X5DPE-G2, so it has four PCI busses on it.
Nate brought me a Promise Ultra100 TX2 dual channel IDE controller (thanks Nate!) today, and I think I’ll try and get three to put in the box, so I’m bidding on two more on eBay right now.
Then I’ll have eight IDE channels in the box and I should get some pretty good performance out if it. I’ll have to think about where to put which drives for maximum performance, but I think it will be nice and fast.
I’m thinking about putting the five RAID 5 drives on the Promise cards – one drive per channel, and the mirrored pair for the OS on the on-board controllers. I can hang the CD-ROM drive off one of the on-boards as I don’t need to worry too much about that drive’s performance.
Or does it make more sense to have the five RAID 5 drives on the three Promise cards and the two on-boards? Then they are on three different PCI busses and the on-board controllers. Would that be faster?
And where do I hang the OS drives? What can I boot from?
I guess I can build it and benchmark it both ways. No reason not to mess about and try different configurations.
I can’t wait for all the parts to get here! This will be fun!
