Need 150 megabyte throughput to HDs

[mcmikemc]

I am going to be doing an experiment soon that will require images taken from 16 cameras to be written to hard drives. The sustained throughput I need is roughly 150MBs a second during time periods greater than 30 seconds. I will be connecting the 16 cameras to 4 PCI-E 1394B firewire cards.

I am currently looking at this motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813151047

I plan on using a PCI-X raid controller for the hard drives and just keep adding hard drives to the striping array until I get the 150MBs write speed I need.

Can the bus that connects the PCI-E slots and the PCI-X slots can handle at least 150MBs in real world situations.

Anybody know the answer to this or where would be a good place for me to look.


Thanks

 

[A5]

Shouldn't be a problem on that board. You could also try to do it with the SAS ports if that doesn't work.

 

[alaricljs]

There's a fairly sizable chain of devices between 2 of those PCIe slots and the rest of the system, but they're all on a 16x16 HT links. 6.4GB/s of aggregated bandwidth for a 16-wide link... yeah I think you're covered on the mobo bandwidth. Just look at the block diag on pg 10 of the mobo manual.

Which RAID card(s) are you looking at?

 

[alaricljs]

This should give you some info on PCI-X disk controller speeds:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articl.../sil-3124_5.html#sect0

It's a SIL3124 with varying numbers of disks in sequential read and write performance metrics.

BTW - using the SAS ports rather than the PCI-X card just switches which pair of PCIe slots are closest to the storage. The further pair will be the same distance with either solution.

 

[mcmikemc]

Originally posted by: alaricljs
There's a fairly sizable chain of devices between 2 of those PCIe slots and the rest of the system, but they're all on a 16x16 HT links. 6.4GB/s of aggregated bandwidth for a 16-wide link... yeah I think you're covered on the mobo bandwidth. Just look at the block diag on pg 10 of the mobo manual.

Which RAID card(s) are you looking at?

I am still looking at RAID cards right now but I am leaning towards this card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16816103011

Adaptec makes good stuff and I am thinking that the cache will only insure that the data stream to the HDs does not dip because of some kind of hiccup.

 

[alaricljs]

Wow dude, rock on... That is one expensive card.