RAID newbie, 3ware 5800 a bad idea??
 

hi folks,

im runnin the latest version of demudi/agnula on a 2.1ghz athlon on a microatx motherboard. i bought a 3ware 5800 raid controller and have been having problems and doubts ever since. here are my questions:

1) my card doesnt seem to be recognized by anything. not by the bios and not by demudi. i cant "alt+3" into the card bios to do anything setup related. lspci doesnt recognize it. i bought this card used. is this a sign of a dead card? honestly, it barely fits into my case and into only one of 2 available pci slots, so im hoping its not an irq issue.

2) this question may be moot, but i realize the bios on the card probably needs to be upgraded. does anyone have any clear explanation on how to do this. i can follow a technical solution and learn really fast, but i still need a solution spelled out for me. i downloaded drivers and firmware upgrades from 3ware.com but, as required by their directions, i dont have a floppy drive to do this. any ideas?

3) and lastly, but most importantly, why am i wasting my time with an ATA/33/66 raid card? i thought id be able to snag an older card with 8 channels so i could get into the technology cheap, safely, with expandability, and at least more speed than my current setup. i have a pair of maxtor diamondmax 9 120gb 7200rpm ata/133 drives, in addition to my old maxtor 18gb system drive and a dvd-burner (also have a cdrom but totally optional at this point). would it just be faster/easier/simpler to just run them on my secondary channel (i know, one drive/channel is best) with software raid? ive got 1.5gigs of pc2700 ram, and 2.1ghz. when i last added memory playing back a full recording session started with no delay, so im thinkin ive got the cycles to spare for the software raid. or, should i just shell out a couple more bucks and get a 7000+ series model?

any thoughts or suggestions would be super helpful. thanks!!!

~ brian