AFAIK, there are boards out there with separate PCI buses, they would solve the problem. I don't know how integrated NICs affect the PCI bus speed of the PCI bus connected to the PCI slots.

I've read about it on StorageReview.com because I was looking into options for RAID cards. There was a discussion about whether a 64bit/33MHz card would be faster than a 32bit/66MHz card or a 64bit/66MHz card and how mixing all those different PCI cards affect PCI bus speeds. The consensus was that a 64bit/33MHz RAID card in combination with 32bit/33MHz NICs is as fast as a 64bit/66MHz RAID becaue of the PCI bus speed drop-down.

I also found that 3Ware just released a 12-channel ATA-RAID card and is about to release a 16-channel ATA-RAID card. Imagine this thing as a fileserver in RAID5 with some monster IDE drives (16 channels = 1 hot-spare + 15 RAID5 = 14*160GB = 2.24TB), should be enough for one's MP3 collection or ripped DVD collection [Smile]
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