Aren't the PERC/2 RAID host adaptors for use in mobos that have dedicated slots for these cards? I've never used or even seen these RAID host adaptors, but I believe these have a single Ultra2 SCSI channel.
The AMI RAID host adaptors that I've used over the years have been the various Enterprise RAID host adaptors, the Enterprise 1200, Enterprise 1400, and Enterprise 1600, as well as the Elite 1600.
I've used a couple such cards on Dell 2U rackmounts, although the ones I used may be specific to Dells.
They are a thoroughly unexciting RAID card. The only claim to fame of the ones I used is that they have an onboard PCMCIA ISDN/POTS modem (56K/64K) and a port on the back to plug the phone line into (obviously). You can phone them up and get diagnostics from the machine, even if it is blue screening or has lost power (the board has a battery on it that runs the modem). This may or may not work on other boxes, I don't know.
Considering that new new Adaptec ATA RAID card is similar to the newer SCSI RAID cards I would think that more than one can be installed at a time. But, who knows if this is actually the case.
I'm not sure if that link will work, it looks really long and weird...
I checked out several of the other the Tekram and LSI Logic sites and could not find any information about using multiple RAID controllers. Maybe we are just supposed to guess if this will work or not. If this is actually an issue that matters to you, then e-mail tech support and ask them if more than one controller will work at a time.
I don't know if this is true for other SCSI controllers, since all I buy is Adaptec (it's a name thing, the same reason I stick with RedHat for Linux installations), but on Adaptec cards, any controller with the same chipset will share the same IRQ. I've seen machines with a pair of 2940s and a 2910 (external only), all hanging on IRQ9.
My "big" linux box has a 2940UW and an IBM ServerRAID (AIC7996) on the same IRQ, too.
One thing I've never tried, though, is to use the second SCSI card in a non bus-mastering slot. I wonder if it could be handled through the other card.
I've installed the card, hooked up a couple 7200 rpm drives, and, with max settings, ended up with about 30 mb sec reads, and, about 10 mb sec writes.
With minimal settings, and the 16 mb cache, in raid 0, the same setup goes into cache reads, with about 60 mb/sec larger block reads, and still 10 mb/sec writes.
Overall, this card, with a couple legacy scsi drives, looks like a great boot card, under 2000, for relatively no money...
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