[XCSSA] NAS the VIA EPIA way

[X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio]

On Jun 28, 2009, at 4:29 PM, X-otic Computer Systems of San Antonio  
wrote:

> On Sunday 28 June 2009 03:08:25 pm X-otic Computer Systems of San  
> Antonio
> wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> [Tim: drive bus/channel quiescing]
>> Yeah in the past that was a big deal. With SATA, I can't think of a
>> controller that doesn't do hot-swap. Granted, without a hardware RAID
>> controller, the OS has to manage all that which can complicate things
>> (device names might be askew after a hot-swap, for instance).
>
> Not if you have battery backed writeback cache. :)

Well, one could argue that the OS is caching stuff for you as well. Of  
course, that's mostly for reads. While the OS can buffer writes (and I  
think it does by default?), it has no battery back up and that could  
suck. I bet the RAID controller, because of the battery back up, can  
spend more time reordering disk access. Another plus here for a true  
hardware RAID card is having something else compute those XORs for you  
when using a RAID5. I'm not a fan of RAID5 in general, but it has its  
uses.

For my application, though, I've been very happy with software RAID.  
It's not a Porsche and, in fact I paid a premium to get a motherboard  
which was intentionally slow :) It's more like a Ford Focus Hybrid.  
There's nothing wrong with a Focus, but a Prosche is definitely going  
to kick it's ass on a race track (straight or curvy). At the same  
time, it's going to use way more fuel even when it's driving to the  
corner store. Fuel is the thing I'm trying to save here.

So not having a hardware RAID controller is really saving on power,  
and in my case, I'm not loosing anyway. That story is completely  
different if you need to use your CPU for things other than managing a  
RAID (such as a DB server).

>
> Does that card you're selling have a BBCache?

Yep. I ran it in writeback mode with no problems and the BIOS reports  
that the battery is good. The card is a few years old so I wouldn't  
expect the battery to be able to hold a charge as well as a new card,  
however it does indeed seem to work, and the 6 ports are a big plus. I  
never put the card through the paces, though. I only had motherboards  
with PCI and this board can do PCI-X *shrug*

Tim