faster? ata100->33 or ata100 on same channel?

[tommyj27]

in an uncharacteristic (and rather sickening) weekend of generousity i swapped my file server with my parents desktop, upgrading them from a P2-400 dualie to an XP1600 with three times the ram. I put my RAID into the dualie rig and got everything working again, but now i'm taking a speed hit because the onboard ide controllers are only ata33. right now i've got 1 drive on the primary ide channel and the other two sharing a channel on my ata133 pci card. i'd like to get all the drives back to at least ata100, and i've been thinking of using another pci controller, but then i worry that bandwidth contention on the pci bus will become a problem.

so does anyone have any thoughts on the best way to do things?

right now the array consists of just three disks, but i may add a fourth in the near future considering the 160GB deal prof posted, either by growing the array or setting it as a hot spare. when i got the _new_ server set up, the drive on the onboard channel had to have the array reconstructed, which it did at ~20Mb/s, so i guess that's a baseline for the current set up.

could i eek any more juice out of the ata33 by moving one drive off the pci controller to the empty onboard bus? i find this doubtful.

would i see a substantial speed increase from another pci controller (likely dual-channel) or is it just going to bog down the pci bus?

any other bright ideas?

 

[Luis G]

Do these drives read 33MB/s for real? I haven't been geek in that aspect anymore but I remember by the times of ATA66 even ATA33 was overkill.

Do not worry about about the PCI bandwidth, unless you were using a faster PCI bus on the other computer it would be the same as onboard controllers use PCI aswell (the only difference being that they are hardwired).

 

[tommyj27]

Do not worry about about the PCI bandwidth, unless you were using a faster PCI bus on the other computer it would be the same as onboard controllers use PCI aswell (the only difference being that they are hardwired).

AFAIK they're the same PCI bus spec, 32bit/33mhz ~= 133M/s, I was just concerned about sticking another controller on the bus, throw in ethernet and you've got a pretty crowded bus.


and no, the spec name is a peak speed, sustained throughput is always less, but the newer specs do have a significantly higher sustained speed. at least double (40M/s) IIRC.

 

[Inkara1]

You sure it's not at least ATA66? Did you try using an ATA66 80-wire cable? My K6-2 400MHz machine from 1999 did ATA66, and you'd think a dual-processor board would be more high-end than a FIC VA-503+ board.

 

[tommyj27]

yeah, the 80-wire connector won't fit. i was suprised too.

 

[catocom]

would i see a substantial speed increase from another pci controller (likely dual-channel) or is it just going to bog down the pci bus?

any other bright ideas?

I think it would handle another card,
I'd go that way.

 

[Stkshft]

Tommy J-

I might have a ATA Controller card you can use.....let me look.

Give me a call I'll see what I can find for ya.