3ware IDE RAID card + IDE -> SATA converters...good idea, or no?

[rocket357]

I recently had a 3ware 6410 IDE RAID card given to me, and I'd like to make use of it in a server at home. I have a few IDE drives laying around, but they're all smallish (between 20 GB and 120 GB), so I'm considering purchasing four new hard drives for it (the 6410 is a 4 port card).

Here's the question I have...I can purchase a few SATA -> IDE converters (like this one) and purchase 4 SATA drives to get considerably more storage space (speed isn't a concern, honestly, but they don't make 1TB+ IDE drives that I'm aware of)...anyone have enough experience with 3ware RAID cards to clue me in to whether or not this is a good idea?

Thanks!

[jggimi]

I don't know if you're looking for OpenBSD-specific information or not. If you are, the misc@ mailing list had a page full of postings about the 6410 Escalade back in 2002 and 2003. Be sure to review the BUGS section of the twe(4) man page.

Disclaimer: no experience with the driver or the 3ware product line.

[rocket357]

Not necessarily OpenBSD-specific, though I've thought about using this card under OpenBSD. I'm certainly NOT going to be running the OS on the card, though.

In all honesty the real reason for this is to move movies that I stream to my Roku off of my desktop's secondary hard drive. It's not mission-critical and as long as the hard drives aren't dropping offline left and right I can tolerate manually rebuilding and restoring from backup. I just hate the idea of having a single point of failure like I do right now, you know?