MSI K7T266 Pro2 (MS-6380)

I'm using this old board only because I had it laying around.  No on board SATA.  It thinks it can boot from USB but none of my USB keys would boot it.

I added an SiL 2 port SATA and a VIA 2 port SATA (both 1.5, not 3.0) cards, a Realtek 8169 (gigabit ethernet) card and 1G of DDR 2100 RAM with what I think is an Athlon XP 1700 (1100 MHz).

I did have to use PLoP to get it to boot the USB, but to store the startup info I ended up using an old slow PATA IDE to bootstrap the USB load, but did not include it in the array.  (Search the forums for PLoP if you need it)

Works like a champ, with 3 drives in the array parity ran from 27m/sec to 45m/sec (after it came off the smaller drive) and as long as it's not calculating parity it would pump a steady 7.5 m/s to clients over 100megabit HALF DUPLEX ethernet (I only had an old hub to connect it to for now.)  When I install it permanently it'll hang off the gigbit switch.  I saw 15m/sec from that in some impromptu testing.  That's not bad when you consider that 26-30m/sec is good when copying from SATA to SATA inside the same machine.

With 5 pci slots there's plenty for networking and SATA cards although I still want a 4 port SATA 3.0 card.  There's no PCI Express on this board, so I'll have to swap the board out to get there.

Rob

(Edited to indicate lack of PCI Express slots)

I'm using this old board only because I had it laying around.  No on board SATA.  It thinks it can boot from USB but none of my USB keys would boot it.

 

I added an SiL 2 port SATA and a VIA 2 port SATA (both 1.5, not 3.0) cards, a Realtek 8169 (gigabit ethernet) card and 1G of DDR 2100 RAM with what I think is an Athlon XP 1700 (1100 MHz).

 

I did have to use PLoP to get it to boot the USB, but to store the startup info I ended up using an old slow PATA IDE to bootstrap the USB load, but did not include it in the array.  (Search the forums for PLoP if you need it)

 

Works like a champ, with 3 drives in the array parity ran from 27m/sec to 45m/sec (after it came off the smaller drive) and as long as it's not calculating parity it would pump a steady 7.5 m/s to clients over 100megabit HALF DUPLEX ethernet (I only had an old hub to connect it to for now.)  When I install it permanently it'll hang off the gigbit switch.  I saw 15m/sec from that in some impromptu testing.  That's not bad when you consider that 26-30m/sec is good when copying from SATA to SATA inside the same machine.

 

With 5 pci slots there's plenty for networking and SATA cards although I still want a 4 port SATA 3.0 card.  There's no PCI Express on this board, so I'll have to swap the board out to get there.

 

Rob

 

(Edited to indicate lack of PCI Express slots)

I have added this board to the Hardware Compatibility Page but would love to be able to confirm Level 1 and/or 2 for the Motherboard Rating System.  If you could do that and then let me know that would be great!!

Thanks

Attached is a syslog from my system using the  MSI K7T266 Pro2 (MS-6380) motherboard.

During this it has been restarted and successfully calculated parity for a 1.25T array of 4 disks.

This should be enough to validate Level 1 compatibility despite not booting from USB.

We should also note that this is not the, I can't remember the word they used for it, RAID board.  This the the bare bones version with only one set of IDE connectors.

Rob