Reserved Memory Space for PCI Bios on 8k5a2+

[manman4]

A question to Epox Tech !

I have a 8k5a2+ board, i am experimenting to try and get the fastest 4 drive RAID 0 setup. I have 2 Seagate U320 SCSI 10k6 hdd, an adaptec 29320-R PCI X contoller running in PCI, an adaptec 19160 controller PCI, 2 WD 80GB JB Hdd,

its currently running, the WD in VIA Master and Slave, each SCSI drive is running on the 2 seperate SCSI Controllers, why ? putting them on the u320 , saturates the PCI bus, there is no desktop board out there that has PCI-X yet ?

by trying to put the IDE drives on the highpoint HPT372, I cant get both SCSI cards to load their bios's. either one or the other card is not loaded if HPT 372 raid is enabled on the 8k5a2+.

is there a way to get around this ? currently running RAID0 IDE with master slave is a compromse, a better one than compromising my SCSI RAID (Software for now, across 2 PCI Cards !)

so i am at a loss, with 2 U320 SCSI drives, i expected around 80MB/sec on ATTO + another 80 for the 2 WD to get me a combined 160MB/sec, with ATTO in this situation i only get 130MB/sec

oh well, wait till i get a dual Opteron with PCI-X setup in 2004 !

[EPoX Tech]

I don't think that the south bridge that you are using is very practial for the application that you are persuing - suggest use of a more mature southbridge or Intel solution for better 32bit PCI performance in order to make better use of card, or alternatively use of a SCSI card better suited to the 8235.

Either way it's about making a suitable component mixture. I wouldn't use this component set personally I am afraid.

I would edge toward a mainbaoard such as EP-4PDAI or EP-4PLAI with 800FSB CPU and use a 32bit SCSI RAID Adaptec card on there - nice southbridge in the form of the ICH5 and then use of card ideally suited to that environment.