PCMCIA Raid Controller - Are there any?

[aiannar974]

Hello,

I have a laptop that I do some home movie video editing on and then crunch it down to DVD format and burn it. Currently, I am in need of more storage and the ability to back the system up easily. I was thinking about setting up a RAID system to improve this data intensive action. I cannot find any PCMCIA or Expresscard 54 raid controllers. Do any exist?

I guess this really leads to another question. Would I be better off with just using two drive and letting one be a write drive and one be a read drive. What kind of performace difference would there be? If I were to do this, is it worth buying SATA drive and a PCMCIA SATA connection or should I just go with USB.

My laptop is an HP ZV6005 with an 80GB 4200 rpm internal drive with an AMD 64 3200+ running Windows XP Home.

I guess when push comes to shove, data security is more important than speed since I do not do a ton of this, but speed is fun.

Any thoughts or info would be appreciated.

Thank you,

Anthony

 

[aiannar974]

Any thoughts on any of the above?

 

[fishmahn]

I doubt a PCMCIA RAID card has ever been made - it just doesn't make economic sense for anyone to produce one.

Splitting the operations to dedicated drives will improve performance. If my memory on PCMCIA data rates is right it should be much faster than USB. In fact, USB is probably no faster than your internal drive even though the external drive would run 7200rpm. Do you have Firewire? Firewire can be faster than USB, though I doubt it will outrun PCMCIA.

Mike.

 

[aiannar974]

Hello Fishmahn,


I believe PCMCIA is at least 100 mb/s. I also have expresscard54 which I think is 300 mb/s and I believe there is a SATA card for this, but it is expensive.

I have a non powered firewire 400.

I think I am going to go with the 2 SATA drives. I like the new enclosure form Vantec that is both eSATA and USB.

Thank you,

Anthony

 

[RichPLS]

Well they do make Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA cards, and other brands, but never heard of a RAID card... doesn't mean one does not exist.
You could use a SCSI card, attach an external drive or two to it, and RAID them software, I suppose.

 

[aiannar974]

Is Windows XP capable of RAID on any drives no matter how they are connnected?

USB
Firewire
SATA
eSATA
PATA
SCSI

Thank you,

Anthony