Asus P4C800 Deluxe

[mrmonsoon]

This m/b has only one connector for the ide raid setup. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of raid (0) of being able to read and write to both disks at the same time?
Would it be worth it to get a pci raid card? 2-WD 80Gig 8 Meg cache drives.

 

[Crashman]

Yes, well, it's not ideal, but they don't care. IDE RAID was just added as a bonus feature that they really aparently didn't care that much about, SATA being their big promo now. So anyway, on to the question: I'm guessing that if your stripe size is smaller than your hard drive cache it might not hurt that much having Level 0 on 1 cable...since the drive mechanics have to catch up with cache eventually and most of the good drives are doing around 1/2 bandwidth from the platters.

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Zeekfu]

wow crash, I have no freakin' idea what the heck you are talking about but it sure sounds like you do.
Could you translate that for the common folk?

 

[Crashman]

Sure, I'll break it down for you:
1.) SATA RAID is popular now, IDE RAID only has a tiny amount of residual (left over) popularity that's quickly disappearing. They most likely designed the board primarily to support 2 SATA RAID controllers, then added the one IDE port as an afterthought.

2.) Drives aren't that fast, typical ATA133 drives can transfer around 1/2 their rating to/from the rotating disk inside the drive. As in, somewhere around 66MB/s.

3.) There is memory on the drive interface, called Cache. It can fill up very quickly.

4.) Transfers only occur 1 drive at a time. But while the controller is moving data into the cache of one drive, the other drive can be transfering data from the cache to the disk. Therefor the loss in peformance has the potential to be minimized.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Zeekfu]

>Transfers only occur 1 drive at a time
Is that in general or only in this particular case as far as raid goes?
What is raid 0 actually faster/better for in practice?

 

[Crashman]

This is specific to the single cable issue. Each cable transfers data to drives one at a time. One cable can't do two transfers simultaniously. RAID0 is faster for transfering most files, as most files are large enough to be divided into parts and sent to two drives. RAID0 does not decrease latency, it only increases transfer rate. Larger files benefit from RAID0 more than smaller ones.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>