Opteron Vs. Athlon X2

[Bill Broadley]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 01:26:10PM -0700, Maurice Hilarius wrote:
> Bill Broadley wrote:
> 
> >So I find it hard to believe where any workstation would need PCI-X
> >unless there's some strange pci-x only card required.  8 SATA ports
> >are also relatively easy to come by on the motherboard.  
> >
> >  
> >
> RAID cards, at least until March 2006

I just talked to Maurice offline.  There are various pci-e solutions
(JBOD, FRAID, and real RAID) that are (and have been) available.
I've been building 16 disk servers out of the Areca-1260.

The 1260 has:
* x8 pci-e bus (2GB/sec + 2GB/sec)
* 256MB dimm
* Intel RAID 6 engine (forget the part number)
* Optional battery backup
* Network interface for management
* Can manage i2c enclosures

I'm pretty happy with it, I have 2 16 * 400GB disk servers, and a few
other folks I know have them (at least one 16*500GB).

One feature I particularly like is you can upgrade the BIOS from a
webbrowser.

The driver has been in the linux kernel for awhile, some helpful folks
even run a yum repository with the areca driver support.

-- 
Bill Broadley
Computational Science and Engineering
UC Davis