Re: Single P4, many IDE PCI cards == trouble??

[lk]

> Is there _anyone_ who is using a number of ATA133 IDE disks (>=6), each on
> its own IDE channel, on a number of PCI IDE cards, and doing so
> successfully and reliably?  I begin to suspect not!  If so, please tell us
> what motherboard, IDE cards you are using.  I used to imagine that a
> terabyte of RAID storage on one P4 machine with ordinary cheap IDE cards
> with software RAID would be feasible.  I believe it is not (although I
> cannot afford to play musical motherboards).

We've tried it with five or six different motherboards, with Intel, Via,
and Serverworks onboard chipsets, and Promise, Highpoint, and Silicon
Image add-in cards, and had no luck.  After extensive testing and
patching, we finally gave up and bought 3ware 8500 cards.  The only
non-3ware IDE we've found to be stable is the Intel onboard chipset.  

> > > My machine locks solid at unpredictable intervals with no response
> > > from keyboard lights, no Alt-Sysrq-x response, etc, with a wide
> > > variety of 2.4.x kernels, including 2.4.22.

We generally got lost DMA messages, but still, we were unable to obtain 
any stability.

> I am giving up now, and have shelled out big dollars for a 3ware 7506-8,
> which I will install early next week once I've figured out how to back up
> and restore 203GB without shelling out even more money.


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