Re: IDE expansion/RAID card
R. Bradley Tilley said:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to use 4 IDE hard drives and 2 IDE cdrom drives in a new
> Debian server that I am building. I have never used IDE PCI cards, and I
> was wondering if someone could make a recommendation??
>
> I just need more IDE interfaces, hardware RAID would be nice, but I don't
> have to have it. I'm more concerned that each drive spins as fast as
> possible while not slowing the other drives down. So, I would like each
> drive to have its own interface... no master/slave stuff.
my tests have shown that there is little to no difference
between having a drive set as master/slave or have it on
it's own controller. ATA100 or ATA133 drive can saturate the
bus. Keep in mind that the standard PCI bus found on almost all
low end motherboards is only 133MByte/second of transfer.
Even if you had a thousand drives you could not exceed that
doing disk to disk transfers.
infact it may be FASTER to have more drives on the same controller
because of this reason, the data going from drive to drive
could probably do so directly while staying on the controller
as opposed to crossing the PCI bus to get to the other disk.
I reccomend the Promise ATA/100 cards (PDC20267) or Promise
ATA/66. I have had excellent luck with them I use them in
about a dozen systems, and they are absolutely flawless, with
one catch. In my experience they do not operate completely
flawlessly when using cables which violate the ATA spec
of 18 inches. While I have never seen data loss, I have
seen a lot of CRC errors when trying to use 24" cables.
Some people seem to think that if the cable is 80wires/40pins
that it's safe and dandy to use 24" or 32" cables..that is
not always the case and I would reccomend against it unless
you have no choice. The only good reason I can think of
to use 1 channel per drive is that your using 18" IDE
cables and the distance between the card and drive is
too much to be able to use the 2nd connector on the ribbon.
on some of my systems this is the case, I need the full
18" to reach the drive.
You'll want to avoid using most onboard IDE interfaces if
you are really sure you want 1 channel per drive as most
onboard interfaces use 1 IRQ for each channel whereas at
least on the Promise ATA/100(and i bet most of the other
PCI controllers) use 1 IRQ for both of their IDE channels.
Promise ATA/100 cards last i priced them was about $30.
They work wonderfully under 2.2.19(I don't use 2.4,
so can't really speak to if theres any problems under
2.4)
good luck
nate
Reply to: