[oXide]

I have two ata/66 harddrives and I want to "raid" them together to make a super drive (for storage, as I have ultra160 serving as the boot device). If i get an ata/66 raid controller, I feel this would be inadequete and would not let me get the full performance possible...I feel this way becuase I think the drives already go about 35megs/sec and together, that would exceed the rated 66megs/sec.....so if I want to get an array consisting of 2 ata/66 drives, I need to get an ata/100 card?? I feel this is true, but feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

-oXide{
p3-700 (clocked to 1000)
320megs
Voodoo5
ultra160
win2k
};

ps..3dfx for life

[chameleon]

you can still go raid, dont worry about that

------------------
win2kbox.cjb.net
P3600EB,TyanTiger133, PC150cas2(128mb), WD 20gb, sblivex-gamer, geforce2 gts

[oXide]

my question, if you read it, is whether or not i should get an ata/100 raid controller, or an ata/66 controller
-oXide

[chameleon]

duh! :p if your drives support ATA100 then definitely get it to maximaize potential, if they are ATA66 drivers then dont bother

[Four and Twenty]

i have the abit hot rod pro 100 and it works great i would recomend it for both price and performance i had a promise fastrak 66 and it was an absolute peice of s.hit so i got the abit card and i can now i have no stability problems whatsoever. I use raid 0 with 2 ata 66 drives as my system drive.

With regaurds to your question i beleive that the 66 is for each drive but i could be wrong. anyway just get the abit card you will be happy

[DosFreak]

Lemme get this straight. You have a SCSI Ultra160 as your boot and you want to RAID your IDE??!! WTF??!!

[oXide]

I have extra ide drives and my ata controller on my mobo is getting screwy anyway...so why not. if life was perfect, i would by more ultra160 drives but they are hella expensive

-oX

[DosFreak]

I know what you mean. I'm going for ATA/100 2X45G raid myself. Gonna go Ultra160 next christmas. Get a Primise ATA/100 RAID controller. Best IDE RAID there is

[oXide]

What makes this Promise controller better than the Abit one? The abit one is super cheap as well. Also, no one has touched my question as to whether or not 2 ata/66 drives working in raid would be limited by an ata/66 raid controller.....let me give you an example:
ultra160 drives go at about 40meg/s...that leaves 120megs of bandwidth free on the SCSI channel....so you can have 4 drives running at raid0 and obtain optimal performance...If you put on 5 drives, then all drives would not be able to run at 40megs/sec...Is this true for ata? What if I have 2 highend ata drives (if such a thing exists=), that do 40megs/sec and put them on a raid/66 controller....then will each drive be limited to 33megs/sec?
-oXide

[JimmyK]

Id unno the asnwers to the posted question but I wanted to mentioned that in actuality the proimse is not the better one. Check any copmarison review and the Hot Rod performs better and plus lower CPU utilization. I like saving cpu cycles every single place I can, thats a big plus for me.

[JimmyK]

this is one of the first reviews I found If I stumble over other ones Ill post them as well.

http://nospin.com/2000_02/009.html

[oXide]

dope...thanks

[DosFreak]

I'll post my HPT360 with 2X IBM 46G tommorow Raid 0 64K. Pretty good scores.

If you plan on having more than 2 HD's on an IDE RAID then your going to get less than optimal performance. The performance freaks only use Raid 0 with 1 HD on PM and 1 HD on SM. Any HD put on slave will work of course but you WILL get degraded performance because of the way IDE works.

[oXide]

How will this array of ata/66 drives compare to my ultra160????

[DosFreak]

It'll be slower or mabye faster on transfer depending on what SCSI drives you have.

HDTACH v2.61

2X45G Raid 0 HPT370 DMA/100

RAS=12ms
RBS=80+ (off the chart)
Read Speed
Max=60912.0kps
Min=25026.0kps
Avg=38750.6kps

CPU Utilization=2.4%