Tom's Hardware > Forum > CPU & Components > Other Components > What's better Onboard ATA100 or PCI ATA133 controller?

What's better Onboard ATA100 or PCI ATA133 controller?

Forum CPU & Components : Other Components - What's better Onboard ATA100 or PCI ATA133 controller?

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jonkc   09-19-2006 at 01:46:04 PM

Hi all,

First I would like to thank all of you who have answered my previous posts, the information is always right on the money!
Now to my current question... I have an older P4 1.5 I am looking to reload XP Pro on. It will only be used for Downloading and checking e-mail and crap like that. No Gaming as I have another PC for that. Here's what I have...
1 60GB drive and I am going to be getting a couple of 80GB drives(no cost).
I have a PCI ATA133 controller that came with another drive that is currently in the system. I was thinking to Load the OS on the 60 and maybe do a RAID0
on the 2 80's but I would like to use the faster controller. Is this possible? Would it be a huge difference?

Thanks,
JonC

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13thmonkey   09-19-2006 at 02:49:29 PM
- 0 +

It will make very little difference to you in RAID 0. I'd argue that with the number of read/writes and the amount that the disks will be spinning for would push for the use of RAID 1. so that you can increase the reliability.

The speed increase from RAID 0 is questionable anyway, but in this case where you are mostly interacting with remote machines I would argue it was very questionable, as your connection will be a far bigger bottleneck than your HDD access.

Another option would be to use them both as storage, one as 'live' storage, and the other for backups, a baseline backup and incremental backups. So if your firewall / virus protection failed you could go back to a previous state from the othert disk. You could schedule the runs to happen automatically every day etc. It gives you most of the benefit of RAID 1, but without the dumb-copy function of RAID 1, so you have some flexibility.

Also it sounds like these are 'second hand' HDD's in which case they are more likley to fail than new HDD's just by the virtue of being older, so reliability should be the aim not unneeded speed.

Thats my thought anyway.

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linux_0   09-19-2006 at 03:45:29 PM
- 0 +

I agree :-D

For downloading stuff and checking email RAID0 is pointless.

There is nearly 0 benefit and since your drives are nearly N times more likely to fail where N is the number of drives in the RAID0 array makes it worse.

The other problem is the PCI bus is limited to about 132MB/sec anyway.

On an order system like that RAID would not help very much and onboard ATA100 vs PCI ATA133 would be about the same performance wise in single drive mode.

GL :-D

Reply to linux_0
jonkc   09-19-2006 at 04:51:27 PM
- 0 +

Well I am not worried too much about backups and that because anything worthwhile I DL will get transferred to my other machine. I was going to do the raid 0 just so I could combine the 2 80's into a 160 so I don't have to remember which drive to save to.
Anyway I guess all I need to know is if it is better to use the onboard UDMA100 or the PCI ATA133 card? Also if I go with the card, and disable the onboard, can I setup XP to boot from it?

Reply to jonkc
linux_0   09-19-2006 at 04:59:25 PM
- 0 +

Use the onboard. The PCI card will not be any better. In fact it may be worse.

If it doesn't have a BIOS booting from it will be a major pain.

Reply to linux_0
13thmonkey   09-19-2006 at 05:26:00 PM
- 0 +

Quote :

Use the onboard. The PCI card will not be any better. In fact it may be worse.

If it doesn't have a BIOS booting from it will be a major pain.



Would a JBOD array be safer than a RADI0 array, i.e. partially recoverable, as oppsoed to unrecoverable?

Reply to 13thmonkey
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