ATA100 controller card

[xxsk8er101xx]

Hi, i'm looking at a, PROMISE ULTRA100 PCI ULTRA-ATA/100 2-CHANNEL 100MBPS BUS MASTER CONTROLLER (Retail) Detail Specs, from mwave.com. Because the RAID controllers SUCK! NEVER BUY ANYTHING RAID! Anyway... has anyone bought a ATA100 controller like teh above and had any luck with it?

Thanks!

oh ya by the way, i can get the controller card for like 34 bucks so it's not that expensive.

<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by xxsk8er101xx on 04/17/01 02:45 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[Guest]

IDE Raid is a joke. I have a SIIG ide controller and did not like it at all. It currently resides at the bottom of my closet next to the 28.8 modems and 5 1/4 floppy drives.

<A HREF="mailto:ddavis@4usgeeks.com">ddavis@4usgeeks.com</A>

 

[Porkloin]

I have to beg to differ with you guys on the IDE-RAID. Although IDE is not as good a platform for RAID as SCSI is, it is a cheap performance booster. I'm running RAID 0 on a Promise Fast Track and the HD performance boost is noticable. Those giant Adobe Premier files fly right by. I'm also using a few of them to mirror (RAID 1) a few of my drives at work and they've worked without a hitch so far.
Why did yours suck?

Sweating like a rancid chunk of pork

 

[Guest]

Well, according to my experience with built in RAID on a A7V133 system, I couldn't wait to jumper back to ATA-100 mode. Seems to me that the Promise RAID for some reason didn't live up to it's rep by increasing I/O throughput. In fact, performance seemed SLOWER than ATA-100 mode.

Go figure....

RJD

 

[Guest]

Excuse my ignorance if this info is wrong but to increase the throughput, I am assuming you were using Raid0 like I was, then the controller would have to read from both drives at once. With ide this is not possible. It will read bit one from drive 1 then bit 2 from drive 2 and so on but not at the same time, correct? So at least for striping ide is not the way to go.

<A HREF="mailto:ddavis@4usgeeks.com">ddavis@4usgeeks.com</A>

 

[xxsk8er101xx]

DO you even know what RAID is? I got it because i could hook up an additional 4 devices. RAID is for corporate servers. The idea is for backup, backup, and backup. You got mirroring, stripping mirring (makes exact copies to other drive) with stripping (stripes the data to other drives) then there is stripping with parity (stripes the data to other drives and then you have a seperate drive for parity and that is all the data while the other drives, the data was striped, some data goes on this drive, another set of data goes on a seperate drive and so on. One of those drives dies, your done, fired back your stuff and go home. with parity what that does is have all the data compressed and whatnot on a single drive while the rest of the data is striped) get it? You may think, wow that is a great way for backups and for increased performace.. what you don't know is that the RAID controller is doing a LOT of work and the RAID controller will die after awhile. and there goes your data, say bye bye. The normal HDD controller will last a lot longer because it isn't doing much work at all compared to the RAID controller... now what i'm asking for is a ATA100 controller NON-RAID! RAID is bad! it can be good, but once the controller dies your screwed.

Now i'm asking about a NON-RAID ATA100 controller card that has 2 channels and can support up to 4 devices on that card. it cost only 34 bucks.. it comes with 80 wire 40 pin cable ata 100 cable and drivers for it. and it is by promise.

The RAID just isn't working and i'm having all sorts of problems with it. For one i can't put my cd-roms on it. reads it as a hard drive!

 

[Guest]

All I can tell you is what it says in the A7V133 manual on RAID 0 with striping; that it increases overall throughput, with the implementation of an Ultra DMA, ATA-100 Hard drive on the Promise controller.

But whether you are right or wrong on the IDE question, my experience is that IDE based RAID is not going to be as efficient as SCSI controllers anyway. Guess I'll just have to rely on a dual NT4 mirroring scheme instead, which I've done in the past.

RJD

 

[Guest]

No one answered the question. Yes I know what Raid is but thank you for the tutorial. The question I had was can both drives be read at the same time. I don't believe they can/are. SCSI is above and beyond this conversation. It will most definitely out perform any ide configuration. I don't need mirroring or parity nor do I have the $$$ to waste on either. Raid0, barely raid, is all I am looking for but with ide it performs slower rather than faster. If it reads one at a time then you are not increasing bandwidth at all thus eliminating Raid0's usefulness. If I am wrong I apologize.

<A HREF="mailto:ddavis@4usgeeks.com">ddavis@4usgeeks.com</A>

 

[Guest]

Derek,

You wrote..." No one answered the question..."

I believe I just did in my previous post. However, I'll repeat it again here in somewhat revised fashion by telling you that according to the A7V133 manual, BOTH IDE drives supposedly read and write in "parallel" for fast throughput, OK? Now whether that also translates performing READ/WRITE operations simultaneously, well -- I can't be absolutely sure on that, given the premise that IDE electronics are not now to my personal knowledge capable of performing such SCSI style acrobatics.

You also wrote..."if it reads one at a time then you are not increasing bandwidth at all thus eliminating Raid0's usefulness..."

Yep. If that is the case, then I would wholeheartly agree, especially taking into account my most recent experience.

RJD

 

[Guest]

RJD, I don't believe they do read in parallel. I was just looking for a firm answer. I appreciate your input. SCSI is where my extra pennies will be going for the next few weeks. Maybe I should wait for Ultra 320. Thanks again.

<A HREF="mailto:ddavis@4usgeeks.com">ddavis@4usgeeks.com</A>