Kennedy Brandt wrote: >and I've personally never tried striping IDE drives into a RAID.
Hi Kennedy, Me either, yet, on a Mac...but I have done it on a PC. A Promise FastTrack66 RAID controller very nearly halves the load time for the big Photoshop files I routinely work with (250Mb, but up to 1+Gig when building satellite image mosaics-- these frequently hit Photoshop's file size limit). Write times are similarly improved. I haven't done any real benchmarking for the numbers since this result was so obvious: 2 Western Digital 80Mb HDDs striped & tested in two different PC systems; Photoshop was shut down and reopened between the two reads of the same file-- one thru the RAID controller & one thru the onboard IDE controller from a third WD disk-- not an engineer's test, but not sloppy. I wouldn't want to do this stuff on a PC without it now. A nice improvement for $25 or so (vs. $$ for 150Gig SCSI RAID). The RAID is being filled with an image library which is accessed frequently for other tasks and so I have need for this large storage capacity. The FastTrack RAID controller was "hacked" from the parent Promise Ultra66 IDE controller by soldering a resistor from one pin to ground and then flashing the card with the downloaded raid BIOS. Search on "Promise raid hack" for links. If the improvement on a Mac is truely only 25% on our machines, it'll be disappointing after this result. Best regards, --Bruce -- SuperMacs is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | Service & Replacement Parts [EMAIL PROTECTED] | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> SuperMacs list info: <http://lowendmac.com/supermacs/list.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/supermacs%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
