Need Good Sata Raid Controller.

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madmunki

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I'm looking at the reviews of sata raid controllers, and they seem to stop at SATA 150. I can't find reviews on the new SATAII raid controllers. So far the best SATA 150 raid controller seems to be the Promise FastTrak TX4. Promise makes a new version of this controller for SATAII, but I can't find a review on it. Since your bus speed is 33/66 anyways, I am thinking a SATAII Raid will only choke the bus, causing performance issues, which may result in slower operation than the SATA 150 Raid.

Also, how would performance of a single SATAII drive, compare to a 4 disk SATA150 Raid?

This setup is going into a strictly gaming maching, which is a Dell 8300, P4 3.2gig, HT, 800FSB, 2 gig ram.

Thanks!
 
TheHeadFL said:
All the results I've seen show SATAII and SATA150 being basically the same.

This is probably due to the PCI bus bottleneck. Kinda what I figured might happen. Perhaps PCI-E will show an advantage of SATAII.
 
madmunki said:
This is probably due to the PCI bus bottleneck. Kinda what I figured might happen. Perhaps PCI-E will show an advantage of SATAII.

No, this is because the harddrive is the bottleneck.

Hard drives do about 60 meg, so If i want you could run most hard drives in ATA-66 and still have their full speed
 
Fact 1) The PCI bus is limited to a max transfer rate of 133mb/s.
Fact 2) A standard SATA drive is 150mb/s.

Between these two facts, a SATA can not put data through the PCI bus faster than 133mb/s.

So if you had a 4 drive SATA raid0, with an output of 600+ mb/s, your still only going to get 133mb/s thru the PCI correct?

So it seems almost pointless to use a SATA Raid configuration through a PCI bus.

Some mobo's have on-board SATA raid. If they don't go thru the PCI bus, they should be able to operate up to your FSB speed?
 
I don't care what kind of hard drive setup you are running, you are NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER going to see anything close to the theoretical maximum sustained throughput. 600 mb/s is just dreaming when it comes to ANY hard drive(s) setup.

Quite simply, you're barking up the wrong tree. The bottleneck is not (and hasn't been for years) the IDE/ATA bus speed.
 
You are making the mistake of assuming that the "diminishing returns" exhibited in that graph has anything to do with a bus bottleneck.

How do you know that continually increasing block size forever is going to continue to yield a performance increase in a linear fashion?

Most things in computing have logarithmic graphs, which is exactly what that looks like.
 
I know if you keep increasing the block size it isn't going to go up forever, you will eventually peak somewhere. However, in this graph it is peaking near or has hit the PCI bus speed bottleneck.
 
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