Bandwith question?

[myth]

ok, my mobo is the Abit IC7 max 3... It has 4 satas (sil chip) on the PCI bus... Unfourtunitly, When I upgraded my bios I now cant use the intel sata on chip for my operating system... So my raided raptors are on the sil chip, I also have 2 seagates 160's on the Intel chip...

I am out of storage space! I need about 200 gigs more at least for now... Do I get a pat drive since it wont hog up my bus bandwith? Or do I get another sata? If I get the sata it will have to go on the sil chip... which already has my raptors on it.. What do yous think?

[Thorsson]

I think you should ditch the Raptors and get a pair of Seagate 200s, which are far superior to the 160s you currently have. But I know Raptor buyers are proud of their weeny platters, so I'll just shut up and go away... :/

BTW with all that heat your system is pumping out I'm interested in what your cooling system is. It must be good.

[zaphod]

Go for a SATA disc definitly. I'd get a 250Gb Hitachi 8Mb cache and 8.5ms average seek. Tought thoes Silicon Image Sata RAID chips only had 2 channells?

[skattrd]

I know what you're going through atm Myth - I've a similar kind of problem and might have to ditch my SCSI RAID as I'm running out of space (in the case) and storage.

For your situation I wouldn't worry too much about bandwidth, as you shouldn't be accessing all the drives at the same time, so either SATA or PATA would be fine, but if I was you I'd consider ditching the 160's for a couple of bigger drives, 250's?

edit: Personally I'm trying to wait until 400GB drives get cheaper

[myth]

BTW with all that heat your system is pumping out I'm interested in what your cooling system is. It must be good.

Actualy after instaling my ultra I had many problems, I got it working now but have my cpu at stock speeds till I work all the bugs out. My cooling is one rear 120mm fan at 5 volts, and a jet 4 on the cpu.

Go for a SATA disc definitly. I'd get a 250Gb Hitachi 8Mb cache and 8.5ms average seek. Tought thoes Silicon Image Sata RAID chips only had 2 channells?

That sil chip has 4 sata conectors on it and the intel has 2, I also have 1 pat open, 2 drives worth available...

[myth]

Well, I just bought a 200 gig Seagate IDE for $67! They normaly cost $150! I just couldnt pass it up...