Question on ATA-133

Raz

I was looking at This Motherboard and I noticed in the Overview section it says

Storage Controller RAID ( Serial ATA-150/DMA/ATA-133(Ultra) )
Storage Controller (2nd) IDE / EIDE ( DMA/ATA-133 (Ultra) Fast Drives )

Does this mean I could put an ATA-133 HDD on a regular IDE bus and get the 133 speeds out of it?

Also does anyone know where I could get some comprehensive (but easy to follow) info on RAID? I want to figure out what this whole thing is about.

SouperComputer

TBH I wouldnt worry about ATA133, after ATA66 there is barely any difference as the drives dont provide the throughput.

In any case, your ATA is only as good as its weakest link and is backward compatible.

IE ATA133 controller + ATA33 drive = ATA33

ATA133 drive + ATA33 controller = ATA33

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive {or independant depending who you ask} disks) comes in many flavours, it uses two or more disks togther to increase speed, fault tolerence or both.

On a desktop it wont be of a major advantage to you, unless you move about a lot of big files. But if you have money to burn, the extra speed is nice to have!

Raz

Thanks soupercomputer.
Well if it has an ATA-133 controller then I'd get an ATA-133 drive to maintain the speed, keeping the drive either on its own on the IDE channel or with an optical drive or another ATA-133 drive.

I do tend to move quite big files fairly often, I back up and format a good lot to keep everything running fresh.
And I think Independant makes more sense, well to me anyway

So does anyone have any links to resources that will tell me about RAID?

kmb

raid is simple to setup but what you need is 2 drives same model number and sizei.e both 60 gig but these would have to be serial ata drives which are expensive at the moment but would give you ata 150 otherwise you can get 2 ata drives same model etc but buy sata cable and adaptors.and set your raid to 0 but whatever you do setting upraid you will lose all data on both discs and if one develops a fault you will lose all data and when setting just set one to boot and 1 to hdd

Raz

Okay I followed some of that but you came across a bit cryptically.
Would you be able to clarify a bit?

lanky

Raid is stright forward enough?

there is 2 main flavours......

for what reason do you want raid?
for data integrity?
or to make your system faster?

because one flavour of raid 0 splits the data blocks to 2 seperate drives so your data is divided between 2 drives...
(so with hard drive failure on one drive your up the creek)

with the other flavour raid 1 the data is mirror'd on 2 drives so if one drive fails you have a copy...... great.....

I think if you are going to use raid 0 for the performance increases, its not really going to make a great perfomance increase for you invstment in time, mony on drives raid contoller cards............


check the web for some benchmake results they only give minimal increses in speed in most cases.....

kmb

the problem with raid one is that if u put 2 60 gigs in you can only use 1 60 gig the other is unusable as it is only a backup ie 2 60 gigs on raid 1 =60 gig total as far as i know....is that not correct lanky?

Raz

Right, I get it now. Thanks for that.

lanky

KMB
yes you're right...... with raid 1 you can only use the space on one drive.

but its a backup situ, if one drive fails well you have all the data...

in raid 0 (you get the use of the 2 dirves for space) but, if one of your drives fails, you are in a bad situation.... you have part of data on one drive, and none on the other so you lose it all.....

but the objective of raid 0 is not based on data integrity just faster performance I guess.