Data Transfer Diagrams, Continued

Three Drives, Three Channels

Here comes the real McCoy! Attaching each of the three drives as master to their own IDE channel results in a utilization of the full bandwidth of the 32 Bit PCI bus!

Four Drives, Two Channels

Some users may want to use four drives at only two channels in order to have a larger capacity. Surprisingly, this does not lead to a maximum transfer rate that is higher than 75 MB/s. However, the minumum rate of 72 MB/s is amazing.

Four Drives, Three Channels

Splitting the stripeset to three channels improves performance to almost 100 MB/s and a minimum of 76 MB/s.

Four Drives, Four Channels

This seems to be the best configuration for power users. Still it is not much faster than the configuration with three drives, each with their own channel.