RAID questions....

[ArcticFox]

I'm thinking of purchasing two 120GB Special Edition Western Digital hard drives and splicing them in RAID 0, but have a couple questions:

1. My A7N8X-DX only has SATA RAID, not IDE. Is this RAID card any good?
2. If your talking about onboard IDE, do the ports built into motherboards today run through the PCI bus? Will using an add-in card degrade performance versus using the (non-existant) controllers on my mobo, RAID performance notwithstanding?

I only have one PCI card (Audigy), but it would be nice if I knew that I wouldn't be taking up any more bandwidth on my PCI bus.

Thanks!

[John Prophet]

is that card ata100 only? get an ata 133 card cuz the 120g drives will be ata 133...may as well have that extra smidge of headroom etc.

I dont think onboard goes thru the pci bus....but lots of peeps use raid cards so I assume the pci bus has plenty of bandwidth for that purpose. (maybe a fast scsi raid card could kill a pci bus' bandwidth but I think pci raid would be ok)

I see ata 133 RAID cards for like $20 but not sure how good they are.....some peeps like "promise" some like "highpoint"....it seems by reviews that 1 is better than the other but I cant remember which, lol.

I'm checking on mine, but I believe most onboard RAID controllers run through the South Bridge which usually means PCI bus. You'd have to check each boards chipset schematic to see for each board though.

Personally, I would say a PCI RAID controller would blow the doors off most onboard controllers.

[ArcticFox]

John - This is also called "RAID On A Budget 101". As in, unless you can find me a similarly-priced ATA/133 RAID card from a reliable vendor, ATA/100 will suit me just fine (and 2 120GB SE's won't go near that ceiling anyways, I've seen benchmarks with 4 of those drives in RAID 0 and it peaks around 90mb/s.)

Evil - To clarify, I wasn't talking about motherboards with onboard RAID. I was talking about the ones like mine with onboard IDE, do they go through the PCI bus? I think they do, but I'm not sure. If it does, than adding a PCI RAID card won't hamper performance one bit. If it doesn't, oh well.

-Fox

Ah, I see what you is sayin' now. Yes, my IDE controllers go through the South Bridge, I believe all of 'em do.

Here's a pic of my mobo, in case you wanna see how perty it is.

[ArcticFox]

So that would mean that, if I took a regular non-RAID controller card and slapped it in their, my bus wouldn't be any more crowded? That's good.

Edit: oooohhhh SEXY MOBO!!!

Edit: I checked 2 places (www.z-buy.com and NewEgg) and they list the 1200JB SE as ATA/100. So it doesn't exactly matter if it's ATA/133 or not except when concerning future needs.

[John Prophet]

diagram

obviously youd have to look at the specific chipset but maybe most of em are similar


Look at pricewatch , I see all kinds of raid cards for less than $30 shipped....dunno bout brands..see lots of SIS and koutech...newegg has koutech. Personally I wouldnt settle for ata 100 no matter what the benches say....why push a piece to within 10% of its limit? To each his own though...but if your going new, dont go old at the same time, lol. (whats the size limit for ata100?)

[ArcticFox]

The ATA/133 spec isn't used by some companies, as the IDE bus is running out of headroom and support for faster speeds. If I can find a decent ATA/133 card, I'll get it, but otherwise I will probably go ATA/100. 2 WD 1200's won't go near 100MB/s anyways.