I just read some thread and then an info page, which both said that your performance will drop if i run more then one hdd per channel....(correct me if im wrong) so now if im running 2 hdds and a cdrom and a cdrw, but only have a normal board, would i notice the difference if i got this: Promise Ultra100 TX2 Controller Card and if i did get this should i run my 2 hdds on each one of the channels on there while runnin my cdrom and cdrw on seperate channels on my mobo or the other way round?? also to get technical what happens with the hdd activity lead?? cheers to ya all....
i have one of those (promise 100tx2) except its been in the attic since i got a RAID mobo cos i don't really need 6 IDE channels. I never had any promlems with the card and found it increased performance slightly on my old mobo. the HDD activity LEDS connect to the card see pic if you do get it you can run what ever you want on each channel but i have bever heard of it slowing down if you have more than one device on a channel. i will point out it will slow your boot times as it has to run its own boot sequence. also you may want to look at there new udma 133 raid card very nice.
so youd say its worth spendin 40 quid gettin that card....i dont wanna get a raid version cause i wouldnt use it anyway... also, is it much harder to install an os on it??
I get very good performance with a CMD 649 chipset controller card running my Barracuda II. MY UATA 66 DVD drive and my CD-RW drive each have their own channels, which results in them being able to do disc-disc copies at 12X (the burner's max speed) without any problems. With the controller, I get 636 in PCmark2002 for hard disk performance, which is really not bad for a 2 year old hard disk.
im getting two new hard drives at the end of this month: seagate barracuda IV 40 and 60 gig.... would you say its worth getting the promise card for that?? and would it be those two that id run on it??
very easy to install and you can get it for £35 at http://www.microwarehouse.co.uk which i think is the cheapest i have seen it.
You're right, but how much depends on what you're doing. With two drives on a single cable, they have to take it in turn to read or write data, on separate cables they can both be at it together. Apart from CD/CD copying, it helps if the swap-file is on its own channel (that's if they ever get used these days with mega-RAM).
