SATA drives plus IDE pc equals d'oh!

[nathanbarlow]

I'm trying to create a freenas box from an oldish PC laying around. Have a 500gb SATA drive and bought another one, then realised that the PC is ide based..... two options. Wwhich is better?

A) get two sata to ide converting circuit boards and use sata drives as ide. How much speed loss are we talking here? I'm using on wireless b/g lan btw.

B) get a SATA pci card and run in sata. Is this supported by freenas?

Advice much appreciated. New to the forums but looks Hood, will aim to reciprocate with other ppl s questions.

Cheers. Nathan.

 

[chriscw]

I would got for the SATA Pci card myself and get the speed advantage of the SATA. However as you correctly surmise this depends on whether or not Freenas has drivers for the card in question. A very quick look at the documentation on their website does not inspire confidence. You could look at an SATA card which emulates IDE many of them do, to an OS they just look like an IDE plug in card and these seldon if ever need special drivers.

 

[nathanbarlow]

yea

option A is the emulating IDE mode. Have to buy a board for each SATA harddrive though, but they are cheap.

Option B means you can get 1 pci card which can run 4 SATA drives. Problem is freeNAS support and also it goes through PCI connection - slower than IDE?

Can someone let me know the following?

- how fast is SATA speeds? i understand it is 1.5 - 3.0 GB/s
- how fast is IDE speeds? no idea on this?

- how fast is PCI speeds? ie if i run SATA drives through PCI interface, what kinda transfer speeds do i get?