Re: Hard Drives

[Richard Malcolm-Smith <rich@xxxxxxx>]

> You will need either a mobo that supports Serial ATA or a PCI card to
> hang the drives off.

You definatly do not want to get a PCI card or an onboard one that uses a
PCI
based chip, normal old PCI on desktop PCs can only handle 133 MB/Sec, and
if you
have a LAN card and other things on the PCI bus you will see lag.

With my software raid-5 I see better performance when I use inbuilt lan
(100
meg) vs a gigabit card in the machine. All fingers point to PCI being
saturated.

AFAIK, only the intel chipsets have the SATA built into the chipset, and
then
its only 2 channels of it anyway.

>>Drives will be for media storage (Wav etc.) only.
>
>
> For storage, you're not likely to notice much difference - if hot swap
> is something that would be useful to you then maybe, or if you were
> putting in a stack of drives and wanted neater cabling (yeah, I know
you
> can get rounded IDEs :p ) I'd be inclined to look at the cheapest
> option, since you're unlikely to get much added value from SATA in
your
> application.

For me it was the cable length issue, parallel ata can only go to 45cm, Im
needing the drives over the powersupply in a full tower case and that wasnt
going to reach.

Also be aware that sata drives have a different power connector, so you
will
need to get annoying adaptor leads for all your drives.


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