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PCI SATA Card

RitualOfTheTrout - May 26, 2005

		RitualOfTheTrout		May 26, 2005
			Ok, further down the line im looking at getting a SATA PCI controller card and getting 2 SATA HDs and setting up a raid 0 for my system drive. Does the PCI bus have enough bandwidth to realize the full potential of this setup? Nothing else is on my PCI bus right now, so the card would have full reign of all available resources. Secondly, Id like to keep 1 IDE drive for storage and also keep my DVD/CD drives which are also IDE. Would the controller card interfere with the onboard IDE or should they all work together? Im assuming my second question is yes, but the first one Im not to sure about bus speeds in relation to HD transfer speeds.

		slinga		May 26, 2005
			If I'm not mistaken, the problem with PCI is that multiple cards compete for the same bandwith. I think PCI maxes out at a theoretical max of 33 MB/s. Subtract from that your nic, video card, sound card, etc. I personally think it would be a bad idea to get a PCI Sata card. How many megs per second can your drives handle? Edit: Actually according to wikipedia, pci can handle 133 MB/s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pci...

		Mask of Destiny		May 26, 2005
			32-bit 33MHz PCI maxes out at 133MB/s, 64-bit 33MHz and 32-bit 66MHz PCI maxes out at 266MB/s, but you're unlikely to see those in most desktops. Chances are some of the onboard hardware on your motherboard is probably hanging off the PCI bus eating up some of the bandwidth. Keep in mind that your average 7200RPM hard drive can't sustain a transfer rate of more than about 30MB/s or so (although transfers from cache are much faster). So this probably won't be a huge problem for a 2-drive setup The SATA card shouldn't interfere with your built-in IDE. You probably should install the OS on a non-RAIDed volume to save yourself some headaches during the install process.

		Scared0o0Rabbit		May 26, 2005
			That's good to know as I have 2 64bit 33mhz pci slots on this motherboard, any idea what a sata card for one of those costs?