Volker Kuhlmann wrote:
I'll use the board that I used last as an example. It was a ASUS P4S800D (I think!) desktop Intel pentium board, and had 4 x SATA interfaces, which show up as device 0 and 1 on channels 0 and 1. The bios allows you to set up Raid 0, 1, and other connotations. I've just cheated and gone onto the Asus site ( and you *know* how slow that is! ). Board was a P4S800D-E deluxe, and there are 2 SATA channels. According to the spec sheet, they're totally separate, though... and you can use raid functione separately. I think that's out of date! Anyway, it's a real nice board, and offers 4 SATA drives, and hardware raid!Many ( most? ) motherboards have it built-in. Stuff 4 x SATA on 2 x interfaces, and you've got some serious performance potential.
Can you clarify "4 x SATA on 2 x interfaces"?
Decent raid cards cost big bucks, rubbish a la promise or highpoint is
cheap. All the PATA raid controllers I've seen on mobos are rubbish
(highpoint and like). Only *hardware* raid on the card itself counts,
Linux can do everything else better. Do you know whether the SATA raid
chips commonly found on mobos these days are any better than their PATA
counterparts? I find that hard to believe.
I'd try downloading the manual for more details, or http://firingsquad.com/hardware/asus_p4s800d-e_deluxe/
or http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=1930 to get a better feel.
Not technical enough to answer that one... I assume bus width comes into it as well somewhere (:Our Canadian friends over at LaCie were looking seriously into it last time I was throwing large amounts of data around - mid 2003. Haven't looked into it since, really, due being really poor these days!
Doesn't it all in the end boil down to you bus (ie PCI) speed?
Volker
Cheers,
Steve
