motherboard decision help

[Brian Chase]

Don't know about dual channel memory, but will watch this thread to learn 
more....

I have had personal experience with hardware parallel RAID and have done 
research on SATA.  If you've got Promise RAID chipsets, forget about it, 
none of them play well with Linux.

A pretty good summary which should tell you more than my humble 
experiences here is provided in the following link.  Myself, I'll be 
doing 3WARE SATA controllers going forward, which is TRUE hardware RAID 
and has excellent Linux support, while SATA technology keeps my hard 
drive costs to a minimum.  MicronPC has some intel based RAID mobo 
solutions that should work as well, but haven't tested them.

	http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

Let me know how you go, I'd like to follow anything like this, as I'm 
often putting servers together on a modest budget.

Regards,

BC

Christopher Bottaro wrote:

> On Mar 14, 2004, at 1:41 AM, Randy Kelsoe wrote:
> 
>> I am using the GigaByte GA-7N400 Pro2 MB, which uses the Nvidia 
>> nforce2 chipset. I'm not using any of the Nvidia drivers. This mobo 
>> uses the RealTek 8169 onboard gigabit lan, and not the nforce2 lan. I 
>> tried using the Nvidia drivers for the onboard sound, and they had 
>> problems. Anaconda selected the intel8x0 driver for the onboard video, 
>> and that works much better than the Nvidia driver. This mobo has 
>> worked well with RH9 (but needed a later kernel), and has worked well 
>> with FC1 right out of the box. It's almost twice the price of the 
>> GA-7VT600-L, but it has SATA, RAID, and Dual Channel memory. I'm not 
>> using the RAID, but SATA works (though not at full speed yet), and 
>> dual channel memory is about 50% faster than single channel mode. 
>> There is also a cheaper model that does not have the RAID and SATA, 
>> and has a 100base T NIC.
> 
> 
> excuse my naivety, but is dual channel memory and hardware raid OS 
> transparent?
> 
> i'm looking to build a new computer also.  i can't decide if its going 
> to be a windows box (for games) or a linux system.  if i can afford it, 
> i want SATA, RAID 0, and dual channel memory.  if the hardware RAID is 
> transparent to the OS, i'd rather do that.
> 
> a couple of questions.
> 
> 1)  how do i know if dual channel memory is working?  is it OS 
> transparent, or do i need to install drivers?
> 
> 2)  "but SATA works (though not at full speed yet)", how do you know 
> what speed its working at?
> 
> 3)  how do you know if you got the RAID setup properly?
> 
> btw, i heard nforce2 has issues with linux:
> http://atlas.et.tudelft.nl/verwei90/nforce2/
> opinions?
> 
> thanks for the help,
> -- christopher
>