Re: New PCI IDE controller or new mainboard - advice needed

The PCI card can do hardware RAID, you will need to install the drivers, I would NOT try installing the operating system on the striped RAID. You are facing an uphill battle getting that to work and then marginal "performance" increase and a lot of headache.

George Valkov wrote:
"Yves Leclerc" wrote:

There are few, and less, motherboards that have separate IDE port. Most now
come with SATA only.

When I purchased the two new IDE disks 2 months ago, I had to maintain compatibility with my mainboard. I also prefered to stick to the old and aproved IDE.


The reason that you performance is low is:

1) Software RAID -- This take Windows resources and slows every thing down,
whenever the RAID stripe is verified/rebuilt.
2) Slave Drives -- Each IDE cable can only read/write one drive drive at a
time. So if the slave drive needs to read from /written to, the previous
request need to stop or complete, This is why when setting up a software RAID
on IDE, most power users usually only place one drive (Master) per IDE cable.
No slave drive used.

Yes and that`s why the two disks that host RAID stripes are the two master devices.
I realise that and that`s the reason I wanted to have four IDE channels - this alows four devices working as master.

The mainboard does not have RAID. A friend of mine (hardware PC programmer), told me that when BIOS finds a PCI card, it will send control to its BIOS and this will alow me to have a RAID BIOS for the new PCI IDE controller, from where I will be able to build the RAID stripe. Right?

Then windows should discover the controller and install drivers for it.

I will also be able to install windows on the RAID stripe, won`t I?



As for set up servers with RAID (mirror or stripe,) I mostly recommend SCSI or
SATA configurations. SCSI based configurations allow multiple reads/writes at
the same time and SATA configurations, each drive is directly cabled to one
SATA port. No Master/Slave configurations on the same cable.


This is good to know! Soon I won`t have any slave devices, so I guess I will be fine with IDE too. SCSI is a high performance interface for high-end servers. A good PCI IDE card with RAID will be just enough for my home-server.




On 12/10/2006 "George Valkov" <a@xxxxx> wrote:

When I access two IDE devices on a same channel, performance is low. I have
four devices and only two slots, so two of the devices are slave.
Primary master and secondary master are two new hard-disks, same type,
dynamic disks with software STRIPE partitions. Primary Slave is DVD-burner.
Secondary slave is the boot hard-disk.

What would you recomend me?
a/ Buy a new mainboard with four IDE channels?
+ it will support AGP8 (the current mainboard supports AGP4)
- is more expensive
- I may have problems activating windows 2003 ent server
b/ Buy a new PCI IDE controller?
+ it will support hardware RAID / STRIPE and I will probably be able to
boot from it (I currently use a software STRIPE on two dynamic disks).
+ It is cheaper
- I may have problems activating windows 2003 ent server

There will be 4 IDE devices and a 4 PCI devies changing its location. Two of
which are LAN cards. Should I notify Microsoft before changing the locations
of the hardware, so that they expect the hardware changes and activate
windows for me? I don`t care If I have to reinstall windows.



details:
/dev/hda : [0,0] Segate Baracuda 320GB 16 MB cache 7200rpm DMA5
/dev/hda : [0,1] Plextor PX-760A 2MB cache DMA4
/dev/hdc : [1,0] Segate Baracuda 320GB 16 MB cache 7200rpm DMA5
/dev/hdd : [1,1] Segate 40GB 2 MB cache 5400rpm DMA5



Thank you for any advice!





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Y.





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