Yet another Openfiler thread about hardware and raid!!!

So for a few months now i've been using Openfiler v2.3 and i'm looking to build a low power consuming machine for a home network.

Current Hardware / Setup
----------------------------
Aopen M-ATX s478 board
P4 3Ghz 800mhz
1GB DDR400
2 x Adaptec 2610A Raid cards 64mb PCI-X but in 32bit slots
1 Intel Dual Gigabit Nic

FTP / MEDIA STORAGE
Raid 5 x 2 cause these cards do not support more then 2TB volumes.
----------------------------
6 x 1TB WD FALS 7200RPM

ESXI 4 U1 iSCSI for VMs
Raid 1+0
----------------------------
4 x 160GB WD 7200RPM


So what i would like to do is possibly get an atom 330 board with a pci-e slot and a 12port raid card and 2 or more GB of ram.
Wondering if this would be a better setup then what i have now.

Now there are some fall outs to what is setup now which are that Openfiler can not detect if a drive has failed so it requires me to monitor this server on a regular basis. I considered doing a software raid 6 but wasn't too keen on that since i read it takes a fairly good machine to compute.

Does anyone have experience with atom boards and a pci-e raid card to take the load off the cpu?

I'm curious as well - looking at doing an Atom 330 with a 3WARE 9650SE-4LPML for storage and wondering how it will perform as an Openfiler box. Any comments of anyone who has done something similar is appreciated.

Well i did some research over the last few weeks and decided to purchase an Adaptec ASR-51245 16 port card. 3 internal 4 port connectors and 1 external 4 port connector on the card.

Card is pci-e 8x and runs both in linux and windows.

My openfiler box has been upgraded to since i built a new mediabox with an ion itx board which is sweet by the way.

So the new openfiler specs are

Current Hardware / Setup
----------------------------

EVGA 610i M-ATX s775
Pentium D 945 3.4Ghz
2x1GB DDR2 667
2 x Adaptec 2610A Raid cards 64mb PCI-X but in 32bit slots
1 Intel Dual Gigabit Nic

FTP / MEDIA STORAGE
Raid 5 x 2 cause these cards do not support more then 2TB volumes.
----------------------------
6 x 1TB WD FALS 7200RPM

ESXI 4 U1 iSCSI for VMs
Raid 1+0
----------------------------
4 x 160GB WD 7200RPM

Now i tried software raid with using one of the 2610A cards just as sata ports but for the life of me its slow to transfer data on the network. With the cards doing raid 5 i was getting 32mb/sec on gigabit network at home and with the drives configured in software raid 5 i was getting 10mb/sec on average which i can't go back to after upgrading my network.

So my intention now is to use the adaptec 51245 card and adaptec webui installed on openfiler 2.3 64bit.

Card should be here next week sometime so i'll post how things worked out.

Since i need to have at least 2 network cards in the openfiler box and itx board is not my ideal setup.