[NTLUG:Discuss] Video card recommendations

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 08:50 -0500, Jay Urish wrote:
> too much... I am on a budget..

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 09:47 -0500, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Then you're not going to find quality PCI-X for under $300.

BTW, understand the "main problem" right now is the lack of PCIe storage
controllers.  The only card I've seen is the $600 LSI Logic MegaRAID
320-2E (2 channel U320, 400MHz XScale, 128MB SDRAM) and it's not as good
as its 320-2X cousin (it's the same IOP331 with a PCIe-to-PCI-X bridge
in the IOP332).

The _only_ PCIe ATA cards are cheap, "dumb" ATA channels with
"FRAID" (fake RAID).  They have *0* RAID logic other than the 16-bit
BIOS Int13h disk services and use the CPU for the software driver.
Because the software driver is proprietary, they aren't typically
available for Linux.  The GPL reverse engineered drivers are just as
crap, and you're better off with LVM2/MD.

> So get a $100 Socket-939 nForce4 Ultra mainboard and use the 4 on-board
> SATA with Linux LVM (RAID-0) and MD (RAID-1) organization.  The new
> Athlon 64 x2 3800+ dual-core is approaching $300 and kicks the crap out
> of anything Intel's got at ALU/FPU operations.  The only time Intel
> competes is when "lossy" SSE is used, and even these latest Rev. E
> Athlon 64 / Opterons have SSE3 microcoded in their FPU (just as fast,
> better precision using the FPU, not a "lossy" SSE pipe).

Use LVM2 if you want RAID-0.  Hold off on the LVM2 Device Mapper (DM)
work like RAID-1.

If you want RAID-1 atop, then make 2-sets of 2 disks of RAID-0 using
LVM2, and then mirror them with MD = RAID-0+1.  Don't do more than 1
LVM2 operation on disks, there can be a race condition.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith     b.j.smith at ieee.org     http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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