surjer said:
I do have a PROMISE ULTRA100 TX2 card.. I wonder if I should use that and mod it to the FASTTRACK and raid my drives that way? Or just find a SATA adaptor like mentioned by psy..
thats a good card, upped the normal IDE speeds LOTS over the OLD board IDEs, it would act SIMILAR to sata. as far as platter speeds goes, it would be ok, and you could always have a upgrade path.
but the sata with the huge writeback caches now 16M, and the massive burst speeds, makes normal OS tasks much faster.
so it depends on the USE.
then on the other hand some people are showing the SAME speed with a SINGLE sata, as with raid 0 on that card. but its benchmarks.
if you put all 4 together on that card, you would blow the SINGLE sata speeds away.
its confusing for me, because the PLATTER speeds did change some for me, because i went to a higher density, higher density less distance to travel for the head on contiguous (or mostly contiguous) data.
if you 2x2ed those on 2 seperate channels on that card, it would still be very very good. so you have 2 arrays, using both channels of the card, about 78Mps continuous. go to the storage foram and you see them doing 80-100 with 2x sata, and 100-200 with 4x sata in raid 0.
BUT they also have rediculous (pure ram) burst speeds.
2x 180 , and 2x 250.
BUT , i know why you got 4 different SIZED drives, cause you bought them at different times, so you would be pairing up some 1/2 dead drives, with some fairly new drives. if they were SPUN-UP for 3 years total time (6 years at 10 hours a day), they are finished, they would be good spare drives, but they would never want to be in a raid 0 striped configuration.
mabey that helps.