Yet another motherboard recommendation

CptDondo · External Since: Oct 05, 2005 Posts: 309

I built a home server based on a Gigabyte 945PL-S3 motherboard.

The board works fine, but the SATA controller is a steaming pile of
horses**t.

AFAICT, it only allows access to one or two drives at a time, so my 4
disk RAID-5 system grinds to a near-halt with a bunch of processes in a
'D' state whenever the SATA subsystem gets under any sort of load.

This happens all too often; all I need to do is to record 2 TV shows at
once, and get hit by a few dozen emails, and perhaps throw an rsync job
into the mix and BLAM! the system starts thrashing, with processes hung
in D state and both cores at 97% wait states.

This has something to do with the IRQ handler or perhaps the SATA
interface; gigabyte came up with a bios update that fixed a small part
of the problem - the ethernet no longer hangs up - but the SATA
subsystem still hangs.

So.. To make a long story short, I need a new mobo.

I need the following:

3 PCI slots
2 PCI-x/16 slots (or 1 PCI-x/16 slot + on board nVidia graphics)
4 SATA drive connectors

The CPU doesn't very much matter; either AM2 or Core2 Duo would work.

There was a thread here some time ago for this type of motherboard but I
can't find it... And I can't find a mobo locator that allows me to
search by PCI slots....

Any recommendations? Or a motherboard search engine that works by PCI
slots?

Thanks,

--Yan

Ogre · External Since: Jun 04, 2007 Posts: 20

CptDondo wrote:
> The board works fine, but the SATA controller is a steaming pile of
> horses**t.

Perhaps all you need is a real hardware raid controller.

Robert Vogel · External Since: Aug 01, 2006 Posts: 3

How about the
GIGABYTE GA-M57SLI-S4 Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce 570 SLI MCP ATX AMD
Motherboard

"CptDondo" <yan.DeleteThis@NsOeSiPnAeMr.com> wrote in message
news:13bk75s9v8khp3f@corp.supernews.com...
>I built a home server based on a Gigabyte 945PL-S3 motherboard.
>
> The board works fine, but the SATA controller is a steaming pile of
> horses**t.
>
> AFAICT, it only allows access to one or two drives at a time, so my 4 disk
> RAID-5 system grinds to a near-halt with a bunch of processes in a 'D'
> state whenever the SATA subsystem gets under any sort of load.
>
> This happens all too often; all I need to do is to record 2 TV shows at
> once, and get hit by a few dozen emails, and perhaps throw an rsync job
> into the mix and BLAM! the system starts thrashing, with processes hung in
> D state and both cores at 97% wait states.
>
> This has something to do with the IRQ handler or perhaps the SATA
> interface; gigabyte came up with a bios update that fixed a small part of
> the problem - the ethernet no longer hangs up - but the SATA subsystem
> still hangs.
>
> So.. To make a long story short, I need a new mobo.
>
> I need the following:
>
> 3 PCI slots
> 2 PCI-x/16 slots (or 1 PCI-x/16 slot + on board nVidia graphics)
> 4 SATA drive connectors
>
> The CPU doesn't very much matter; either AM2 or Core2 Duo would work.
>
> There was a thread here some time ago for this type of motherboard but I
> can't find it... And I can't find a mobo locator that allows me to search
> by PCI slots....
>
> Any recommendations? Or a motherboard search engine that works by PCI
> slots?
>
> Thanks,
>
> --Yan

Captain Dondo · External Since: May 25, 2005 Posts: 300

V Wed, 08 Aug 2007 15:47:45 -0700, Ogre napsal(a):

> CptDondo wrote:
>> The board works fine, but the SATA controller is a steaming pile of
>> horses**t.
>
> Perhaps all you need is a real hardware raid controller.

I would if I could, but I have no slots available. Sad

--Yan