good motherboard w/ many IDE controllers

I am looking for a motherboard that is know to work well with Linux that
has many IDE controllers onboard.

I'm assuming "many" will mean 6, e.g. a hpt374 plus the chipset's IDE. I've
never heard of a motherboard with more.

"Thomas Reat" <treat00@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3c4289ad.0308100418.57a1104c@posting.google.c om...
> I am looking for a motherboard that is know to work well with Linux that
> has many IDE controllers onboard.
>
> I'm assuming "many" will mean 6, e.g. a hpt374 plus the chipset's IDE.
I've
> never heard of a motherboard with more.

Why so many IDE controllers? Do you want lots of disk space?? You mention
the highpoint controlle so do you want RAID?
Maybe you need need to investigate SCSI disks/logical volume manager

gtoomey

Thomas Reat wrote:
> I am looking for a motherboard that is know to work well with Linux that
> has many IDE controllers onboard.
>
> I'm assuming "many" will mean 6, e.g. a hpt374 plus the chipset's IDE. I've
> never heard of a motherboard with more.

I recently bought a Western Digital 160 GB hard disk at CompUSA for
$169.99 - $70 mail in rebate. The drive came with its own ATA-100
controller card - perhaps on the theory that most buyers were upgrading
older computers that couldn't run at that speed.

In any case, the price was unbeatable - cheap disk + another card good
for two more drives on top of the 4 permitted by most motherboards.
Unless I'm mistaken (more than possible since I have no serious
experience in this area), you can add IDE controller cards without
disabling what you've got on the motherboard.

On 10 Aug 2003 05:18:46 -0700, Thomas Reat wrote:

> I am looking for a motherboard that is know to work well with Linux that
> has many IDE controllers onboard.

I'm running Libranet 2.8 on an Epox 8K9A3+.

> I'm assuming "many" will mean 6, e.g. a hpt374 plus the chipset's IDE. I've
> never heard of a motherboard with more.

This is how the 8K9A3+ is configured. I'm running 3 HDDs and an ATAPI
CD-RW, each on its own IDE adapter -- no RAID.

On 10 Aug 2003 05:18:46 -0700, treat00@yahoo.com (Thomas Reat) wrote:

>I am looking for a motherboard that is know to work well with Linux that
>has many IDE controllers onboard.
>
>I'm assuming "many" will mean 6, e.g. a hpt374 plus the chipset's IDE. I've
>never heard of a motherboard with more.

Not exacly your answer, but recent Maxtor PCI ATA133 boards coexist
nicely with the motherboard controllers on Intel and Asus
motherboards. Windows needs a driver, but Linux (RH9) just sees it
and goes. I havn't tested booting from a drive connected to one yet.

The Maxtor has a primary and secondary controller, 2 drives each (as
usual), so that gets you 8 drives in 1 system. I havn't tried
stacking more than one of these controllers in addition to the
motherboard IDE controllers, but it would probably work.

Mike-

Mornings: Evolution in action. Only the grumpy will survive.
-----------------------------------------------------

Please note - Due to the intense volume of spam, we have
installed site-wide spam filters at catherders.com. If
email from you bounces, try non-HTML, non-encoded,
non-attachments.


----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeed.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups
---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

"Gregory Toomey" <NOSPAM@bigpond.com> wrote in message news:<bh5gv3$tusq2$1@ID-202028.news.uni-berlin.de>...
> "Thomas Reat" <treat00@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:3c4289ad.0308100418.57a1104c@posting.google.c om...
> > I am looking for a motherboard that is know to work well with Linux that
> > has many IDE controllers onboard.
> >
> > I'm assuming "many" will mean 6, e.g. a hpt374 plus the chipset's IDE.
> I've
> > never heard of a motherboard with more.
>
> Why so many IDE controllers? Do you want lots of disk space?? You mention
> the highpoint controlle so do you want RAID?
> Maybe you need need to investigate SCSI disks/logical volume manager

Yes, I want lots of disk space. I want a system that has the best
cost/GB ratio, while still being of high enough quality to perform
well and be reliable. Downtime to change a failed drive is OK.

I'll be raid-5ing the disks with the md driver. It performs better
than any cheap hardware raid-5.

SCSI unfortunately while nice, fails to fulfill this. For the cost, I
will have less storage or less performance that an equivilant IDE
solution. If money is no object, SCSI is wonderful to have.

For IDE to perform well, you need one drive per controller. Luckily,
the controllers cost about a tenth of SCSI controllers. The drives
cost half as much per byte.

Maybe you were going to buy an expensive fibre channel disk array and
plug it into a 1Gb/s fibre channel controller. You'll find that it
gives you 100MB/s in the real world. You think that's fast, say it's
$20k for half a terabyte. Now take a system with 10 IDE controllers,
no matter how you slice that disk up (it's an awfully big raid-5 group
but maybe striped raid-5s would good) it is going to blow away your
$20k raid. For $2K you can have a full terabyte, and get 250MB/s for
real, on reads.