reccomend a raid controller card?

[itsanobscureid]

looking to set up 4 x 40GB Maxtor fireball 3's striped in my system - can anyone reccomend a decent raid pci card that reasonably priced .... i seem to find cards for either £250 or £20 - anyone have any recomendations ...

any advice much appreciated

ps. motherboard is an asus a7n8x dlx if that is of any relevance

tar
d

[Shorty]

Highpoint 4 channel card

Highpoint Rocket Raid 404 4Ch ATA133 Raid Host Adaptor £78.14 inc. VAT (scan.co.uk).

I wouldn't recommend going for a 2 channel card as they will simply cane your performance.

I used to have one of these onboard my EPoX 8K5A3+.. and striped 4 x WD SE 8MB cache drives. They are awesome and cheap

4 drives is pretty excessive though talk about maxing out the PCI bus!

[itsanobscureid]

so do you think 4 drives would offer still a signifiicant performance increase ...
its just i have 4 laying around at work and need some extra storage - thought raid would be the obvious solution but maybe i should just get a card to add more ide ports

ur thoughts

[Shorty]

The performance difference between 2 and 4 isn't big.

The PCI limits the possiblities quite considerably.

2 in a RAID-0 would be a better bet. Infact, you wanted some safety as well, you could raid 0+1.

2 drives as drive C:
2 more drives mirroring that virtual C: drive.

Security and speed. There are obvious CPU load overheads with this but if you have a fast system, they are minimal. I've been running this setup for a while and my JB's do nearly 100mb in ATTO benchmarks (16k stripe/16k cluster)

Adding additional IDE ports is the other option.

It depends on how much space you need and what you want to do with the system.

RAID is a nice option but IDE raid is a little overblown in just what it can actually do. It's not _that_ much faster unless you use it in the right places with the applications (scratch file for photoshop, temp files....)

[spikegifted]

Eh... Hold on. The RocketRAID 4 channel S-ATA controller has 2 internal and 2 external channels... So how are you going to use all 4 channels if you're only internal devices?

[Shorty]

Originally posted by spikegifted
Eh... Hold on. The RocketRAID 4 channel S-ATA controller has 2 internal and 2 external channels... So how are you going to use all 4 channels if you're only internal devices?

That is the ATA not SATA controller

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by Shorty
That is the ATA not SATA controller

Huh... Shot from the hip, again... Sorry!

[Shorty]

Originally posted by spikegifted
Huh... Shot from the hip, again... Sorry!

Heh. We all do it mate