good RAID on a single processor mobo?

[big daddy fatsacks]

being that i store a lot of DV footage i am a bit obssessed with storage size and speed. in the past that has required a dual processor board with PCI-X slots on it which can accomodate high-end storage controllers. it has come time for me to upgrade my editing rig and as usual storage is a concern.

with dual core AMD chips coming out the processor power required for DV editing is actually achievable on a single processor board. with SLI boards out i am wondering if the storage aspect is not also achievalbe on the single proc boards as well.

the AMD architecture puts my pci-e slots on the hypertransport link to the processor right? and there are SATA and SCSI raid adapters for pci-e slots coming out. so i don't have to worry about some crappy 32bit/33mhz pci bus on a single processor board bottlenecking my 8 drive raid array anymore right?

just looking for some clarification here.

thanks,
big boi

 

[doormat]

The PCI-E slots are hooked directly to the southbridge (or whatever), which is on an HT link to the processor.

When PCI-E raid cards come out they wont be bottlenecked by PCI 32b/33mhz. But they might be bottlenecked if you try to put an PCI-E x8 link into a x1 or x4 slot.

Most uniprocessor mobos only have x16 and either some x1 or x2 slots. A legit PCI-E raid card would probably want at least x4 (FWIW, each PCI-E lane carries 500MB/s - 250MB/s from the comp to the card, 250 from the card to the comp).

The only real thing I can think that would satisfy that would be a workstation board running nVidia's 2200/2050 combos OR maybe an SLI board, and one of the x8 slots be filled with the RAID card - I dunno if you can do that though.

Some of the nVidia professional boards come with NVRAID II, supporting SATA II and RAID 0,1,5. But you'll probably need opteron chips to put in there too.

 

[big daddy fatsacks]

you're saying it may not be possible to put a raid card in the extra pci-e 16 slot on one of the nforce4 SLI mobos? is this a restriction of the nforce4 chip?

the pci-e cards that are out seem to be pci-e 8x btw.

 

[doormat]

I dont know if its possible or not, I've yet to hear from anyone who has tried such a thing. I sure hope it is possible, though SLI boards are fucking expensive!

 

[unhappy_mage]

The thing with the 2200/2050 is that the 2050 provides an extra bunch of pciE lanes (16 or 20, i forget) so boards with both (tyan 2895 is the only one I know of) will have 2 real x16 slots. Others will have 20 lanes, so basically 2 x8 slots and 1 x4 or some x1s. As far as I know it should be possible (and really awesome) to get a board with pciE slots left over (DFI ultra-D) and put the raid card in there. I see no reason why not.

Areca already has some awesome raid controllers in pciE format out. Google around and you'll find them. They're expensive but they perform really well, as this review shows.

 

[DougLite]

The only difference between the 2200 and the 2050 is that the USB ports are disabled on the 2050. If the mobo makers choose to implement them on the PCB, that means you get two GbE connections, 8 SATA ports, and 40 PCI-E lanes. It would be a monster of a board, but it's possible to implement one 2200 and three 2050 (using 8xx Opterons) and get 4 GbE connections with ActiveArmor/SNE, 16 MCP integrated SATA ports, and 80PCI-E lanes. The only thing you don't get more of, like I said, is USB ports. Where's a *drool* emoticon when you need one? Furthermore, all of those devices are connected directly to the MCPs and interconnected using Hypertransport, meaning none of those peripherals use bus bandwidth, leaving plenty of that for other tasks.

 

[doormat]

However, dont forget that the GbE ports that utilize the 2200 and 2050 are crappy due to lots of processor overhead. Most implementations of the 2200/2050 actually use broadcom chips to implement the GbE.

Also, another note is that if you do buy a 2200/2050-based board, in order for the 2050 to work, it is required that you have two processors in (since the second processor hooks into the 2050).

But even 8 SATA-II ports in a RAID 5 config would be nice. With 300GB drives, thats about 2TB, enough to max out a regular windows partition (NTFS partition without going to a dynamic disk).