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Hard disks -- I'm considering going for RAID5 for reliability, and maybe sticking 3 or 4 disks in it, but that means that I'll probably want to opt for SATA


So I splashed some cash last week. I'm now the proud owner of a 3ware 8506-4LP SATA RAID5 card, a 3ware 4-in-3 SATA drive cage, which supports hot-swapping, and 4x 200Gb Seagate Barracude 7200.7 SATA disk drives.

For the moment, I was planning to install it in my existing case, with my existing motherboard, but I've run into a bit of a problem -- the RDC-400-SATA drive cage is quite deep, and won't go in all the way without colliding with some important looking capacitors on the motherboard.

Moreover, while the 3ware drive cage takes up 3x5.25" bays, and my CD-RW drive takes up another, the claimed 4-bay space on this PC actually appears to be 3.99-bay, so it won't squeeze in vertically either.

So, it looks like I'm off to Tottenham Court Road this afternoon to pick up a new case.

On the good news front, however, the card/cable installation went fine. The card works fine in a 32-bit PCI slot on my Asus A7V, and I've installed the drives in the cage. The RAID5 array creation took well over an hour, but it's done now, and I'm just reinstalling the kernel to add support for the controller card.
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-- roger