RAID SATA, or RAID IDE

I have the A7V8X Motherboard. It has RAID but only 1 IDE channel and 2 SATA channels. Would the IDE only having 1 channel have less performance then IDE with 2 channels? Just curious if I should get IDE 1 channel, or SATA 2 channel.

Not familiar with this board, but usually not all channels support raid.

On my board I have 4 ide channels. 1 and 2 are normal channels, and 3 and 4 support raid. Raid can be configured only on the channels 3 and 4.

The newer boards which come with SATA have 1 or 2 ide only channels and another 2 SATA channels which support raid.
So I guess your board supports raid only on the SATA channels.
Check in the manual or bios...

I have 3 total IDE channels. 2 are normal, 1 is for raid. On the same RAID controller is also 2 SATA channels.

Well, then it depends on the drives and the raid controller.

I don't know if all controllers are smart enough to share optimaly the ide channels. If you need to read 1MB file is it going to send 1 request to the first drive then withoiut waiting for the result to send the other request to the other and then collect the data from the disk cache...
I assume all controllers should be like this but not sure since raid was not created for ide (scsi doesn't block the channel).


If you use new drives (around 50 - 60 MB/s transfer speed) with ATA 100 then you may have bottleneck on the raid bellow 100MB/s. If you use ATA 133 you should be fine. ( 2 * 60 < 133 )


If you are going to create a raid array then you have the disks handy. So you can try both and test the speed with atto.
Also you may be fine just reconnecting the disks without recreating the array. I can move my disks around in any combination and the array is recognized. But I have only ide channels. Not sure if you move from ide to sata but it should work.

As I think of it you may be even able to create raid array with 1 disk on ide channel and 1 on sata...

But IDE, cant only 1 thing read/write at a time on them? Making RAID pointless on 1 IDE channel...

Yes, ide can read/write to only 1 drive at a time.
Let's say the drive speed is 50MB/s.
And for easy example the stripe size is 1MB (less then half the disk cache).

If you want to read 100MB it would normally take 2 secs.

If the controller is smart though it would take 1 sec:

1) request 1MB from drive 1 without waiting for the data.
2) request 1MB from drive 2 ...

3) wait for drive 1 to fill the cache with 1MB of requested data
4) request next 1MB from drive 1
5) request next 1 MB from drive 2
6) transfer the 1MB data from the cache of drive 1 at speed 100MB/s or 133MB/s
7) trasfer 1MB from drive 2 cache at 100MB/s or 133MB/s
8) if needed mnore data go to step 3


Note that while reading the cached data from both drives, they both continue to read in the remaining cache. So the wait time (in step 3) will be 0 for all reads except the first one.

This way all the data is read at effective rate 100MB/s.
So both disk are reading data non stop at rate 50MB/s to their cache.
When there is enough data in cache the controller reads it from 1 drive at 100MB/s then from the other drive...

This way the 100MB will be read at 100MB/s so in 1 sec.
Which is twice faster then a single drive.
So it will still work because the drives have cache.

Now I am not sure the controllers use this optimization.
If they read live data (not waiting to read from the cache) then they will read the data at 50MB/s and the effective rate will be only 50MB/s...

So if the controller is smart enough raid-0 still makes sense on single ide channel if the channel speed is at least twice faster then the disk speed and the disk has cache.

So only test can tell...

Well, I dont want to buy IDE and it not work, so I just went with SATA. Thanks for all the info!

Wise decision.

Good luck and have fun.

P.S. You can post and compare results here:
http://forum.oc-forums.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=201920

You may also test before raid and with raid - this will be interesting...

uhh... I'm pretty sure "IDE" is all ATA... SATA and PATA are both IDE...

"Drives that use the interface officially known as AT Attachment or ATA are also often called something else entirely: Integrated Drive Electronics or IDE drives. In fact, the term "IDE" is probably more widely used than the correct name for the interface! (This is changing, however, as new terms such as "Ultra ATA" grow in popularity.) IDE can be considered the unofficial "overall name" for this hard disk interface; it has been used since the earliest days of these drives, and will probably always be used by a large segment of the industry." from here:

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/if/ide/unstdIDE.html


You really should be asking SATA or P(arallel)ATA. Both are IDE. I'm not really sure that SATA is that much more technologically advanced than PATA, excpet it cleans out alot of the lingering PATA problems inherent in parallel... Biggest calling for SATA for me si the 10,000rpm Raptors, those things fly.

I was looking at doing a SATA raptor raid5 setup, but the time I got a card that did raid 5 and had a hardware raid (that didn't offload operations to the CPU), the cost was like 800$ The cheapest SATA controller that does that is an adaptec model, cost like 330$ That's why I went Ultra160 SCSI, found a good deal too. If you have the SATA drives, cool, otherwise look into SCSI before you go all out on SATA.

I knew that IDE and SATA were both ATA, just a new connection. SATA is ATA150, even though hdds dont xfer faster then 60-70mbs second. I went with SATA because RAID on 1 IDE channel is not as good as on 2 channels. Well..I only have 1 IDE channel for RAID, and I have 2 SATA channels for RAID. So I went with SATA.

Right... so if you knew the difference, why title the thread "RAID SATA or RAID IDE", which doesn't make any sense. If you were to expand out the title to it's real meaning, you would get "Raid Serial ATA, or Raid SATA or PATA". Since IDE encapsulates basically anything with an onboard controller card.

SATA isn't really just a new connection, it just happens that there aren't any real SATA drives out, most if not all are just PATA drives with built in converter chips. By that I mean there are things that the standard specifiecs that haven't been implemented yet. So it seems like they're just a new connection.

If I were in your situation, and I didn't want to invest in SCSI, I would have made the same choice. I wasn't questioning that.

Thanks for clearing that up.

But how many pepole would even open a thread named
"SATA or PATA?"

I didn't even know that the proper name for ATA is PATA...

Now I know...
Thanks!

true, thank you.

I already invested into SCSI. Seagate 15k 18gb 3.6ms seek time scsi. Its nice, gets better scores then my brothers 8mb cache 7200rpm hdds in RAID 0. I need storage now, the 18gb is nice for OS and main aps/games...but now I want storage and speed, and have my storage at least try to keep up with my scsi.

Another ?...I can only have 1 SATA drive on each channel, so then whats the point of having a 150MB xfer rate?!? The hdd itself cant even do that..