SATA converters --> speed?

[adelphia83]

I just got a new motherboard, a Soltek Nforce2 U400 w/ the Promise SATA raid on the motherboard (not sure the exact chip, doesn't specify).

My first question-- I have two WD800JB's that I plan on setting up a RAID0 with. In order to do this on this controller, I was forced to toss 50$ at a couple SATA converters. My question being-- is there any bottleneck or speed decrease associated with the use of these? Seems it would probably be faster without them, but anyone with experience using these, please let me know about them. Such as any negative speed impact, whether or not they work flawlessly with existing ATA/133 drives, etc.

Also I was reading through the manual's PDF on how to setup the ARRAYs, and nowhere in that manual did I see anything about selecting stripe size. Does anyone know if this is possible and how to do this with the Promise SATA RAID controller? (I'm assuming it's the newest promise controller, as this is a brand new board).

TIA!

[gtsimmo]

on strip size go with either 16k (preferred) or 32k for an OS array. If it's going to be a data array for mostly big files like Divx go with higher 128k + block size.

Using the converters wont decrease your performance. It can easly handle the traffic from your drives. Most converters out there use a Marvel IDE TO SATA converter which can also be found on the WD Raptor Drives which easly puts out more than any Stanard IDE drive. So if it can handle the data output of the Raptor i wouldnt be concerned over it.