I am going to be using RAID when I put my computer back together. So I dont know much about it yet, but most onboard RAID controllers have 2 channels with the two devices per channel. Except the Abit AT7 which has 4 channel RAID, but that is a little overkill if you ask me. So, i have no expereince yet, but hopefully by the end of the week I will.
personally onboard raid is junk.. if i were to invest in a raid setup, it would definatly be SCSI and raid 5.. most IDE raid setups ive seen are 0 or 1... fast with no reliability, or reliable and slow? raid 5 is striping with parity, one drive goes, you can still rebuild your data..
My EPOX 8K3A+ has 2 chanels for ATA133 Raid, provided by a Highpoint HT372 controller on board. Not using it in RAID yet, just using it for the IDE channels so that the Burner, DVD and HDD are masters on their own channels (no Sharing).
Almost the same as GOO, have 2 raid channels and 2 ide channels making 4 ide channels in total, no RAID actually being used on it, just have everything on its own channel is nice Used to have 3 cd rom drives but now I am down to 2 and I also used to have 2 HDD's but again I am down to 1. At with the current noises my drive is making I might be down to 0 HDD's in a minute
my bad.. pretty much the usual iv'e seen is two channels for 4 drives in either a 0, 1 or 0+1 setup.. -scoob8000
I'm using a highpoint 370 PCI controller. 2 channel. I'm running RAID 0, with a device on each channel as master. my cdrom and cdrw are on my motherboard controllers. I haven't benchmarked it in different configurations (both on one controller as master/slave) but I read that it would be more efficient to use one channel per drive, so I have.
I've got two ATA133 RAID channels on ma KR7A-133R, but I cant afford the drives to use raid :cries: ~Sepherus
I have 2x40GB maxtors in RAID0 onboard RAID on my MSI KT333 Ultra-ARU, 2 IDE RAID channels, 2 normal IDE channels so 4 IDE channels if you dont use the RAID, it's a Promise fasttrack controller and is fine for me
The reason for that is, on IDE the controller must issue a command to the drive, then wait for reply. So basically while this goes on, the entire channel is occupied, rendering the other drives unreachable. Which means that scaling an array on two channels will not simply scale the performance as well.
That is exactly what I had read, and why I set it up that way. It's really simple to change over, I'll run a pcmark2002 on it tonight and see what the difference is. maybe others can post their pcmark scores, see if we can see some quantitative evidence of how fast is "fast" I remember looking at mine and other peoples and being startled at how much slower mine was But I have a Thunderbird 1.4 and that is going to be a bottleneck compared to people with 2 gig processors.
Got an ABIT KR7A-RAID 133 setup with 4 80GB ATA133 Maxtor Drives in Raid 0 (312GB is what it says) +I use all the other channels for DVD, DVDRW,CDRW, and 60xCD... My speeds are faster than ata100 single drives, but not much... Maybe I have too much hardware...
If it's not a complete nightmare (ie you've filled up the array) I'd bench it as a two drive array, then a 4 drive. It's not unheard of for performance to actually drop when going from two drives to four, on just two channels.
I'm running Promise Fasttrak 100 TX2 4x Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40Gb RAID 0 I've found the promise much much better than highpoint... Highpoint tends to crash if a drive fails and setup/ configuration of highpoint no way matches the promise. Promise also has nice utility which gives you the status of the drives in windows. During testing I configured a RAID 1 array with 2 drives. On highpoint unplugging the power connector on one drive crashed the system. On promise unplugging the power connector on one drive resulted in a message box popping up after 30 seconds warning me that a disk had failed and that the array was critical (non-fault tollerance, but working). I use a 160Gb HDD on another system to backup my RAID 0 array. Kane
