Will there be a serial drive to parallel converter

[fireflayer]

I just found out about an auction a local college puts on where they sell a bunch of servers for really cheap. I'm guessing I can get a RAID-5 card... not sure if it will be SCSI or IDE, but if it's IDE I'm interested in this.

I'm going to be purchasing 2-3 serial ATA drives assuming everything is good with them. Will there be some sort of a converter so I can run these on a parallel RAID-5 card?

Also, can a 64bit PCI card run in a 32bit... and once the new PCI revision takes place, will I be able to use the full bandwith of a 64bit card?

Thanks

 

[lhgpoobaa]

well i know parallel to serial converters exist... so one would logically assume that revers ones would also be common during the swapover period and for some considerable time after.

<b>My CPU cooler is so Massive it bends Space and Time! </b>

 

[fireflayer]

I knew about the parallel to serial converter, the only reason I wasn't sure if they went both ways is if I remember right, for mice and keyboards, there is a USB>PS2, but not PS2>USB, but I guess this is something quite a ways away from input ports.

Thanks though, do you know this more than just speculation? Just wondering because if I'm going to spend $100 or whatever on a used RAID-5 card I'd like to be sure I'm able to use it with my new drives.

 

[lhgpoobaa]

not for certain no.
but think logically... about all the standard ata devices currently out there... manufacturers cant just cut them off cold. i see adaptors as having a long life ahead of them.

as for raid cards, something else may come into play... you can have 2 drives on a standard ata channel, yet it seems that only one is allowed with a serial ata cable. will this halve the number of drives u can use on that raid card? who knows

<b>My CPU cooler is so Massive it bends Space and Time! </b>

 

[fireflayer]

Yeah, I suppose (and hope) you're right about that. Now that I think about it, it seems simpler to convert a serial signal to parallel than the other way around, at least with my limited knowledge of the subject.

I'll probably end up going with a 4 channel card if I can find it, I'd hope that would be good enough for me regardless of if I can attach 1 or 2 disks/channel.