On Thu, Sep 18, 2003 at 08:40:43AM -0400, Matthew Caron wrote: > >Right, I was thinking about a 3-ware IDE Raid. I'll have to compare > >the two. > > Well, the one thing you have to be careful of is that a lot of the low > end RAID controllers are essentially just hard disk controllers with > lots of ports, and they rely on the host to do most of the processing. > (Ala software RAID).
This comment is very true for the low end RAID controllers, specifically I know that the Promise and Iwill controllers I played with last year were implemented exactly this way. They were simply two independent IDE ports on one PCI card, and it was up to the host PC to use them as a RAID or not. All software controlled. However, the 3ware cards, unless 3ware has introduced a cheap version (I've not heard of it) are true real hardware raid. I've got one in my pvr right now, it's an older 2 port model that isn't anywhere near as fast as it's more modern cousins, but it's true full hardware RAID, and only cost me about $25. I highly recommend the 3ware cards if you want to use RAID and IDE in the same sentence successfully. The card I've got achieves about 95%+ of 2X the data rate of a single port with two drives attached to it, all handled onboard the card. With the Promise and Iwill controllers, I never actually say more than about a 50% speedup compared to one drive from running dual drive RAID. Plus, the 3ware cards have Linux drivers in the kernel source, and you can also download Linux drivers off of 3ware's website. ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Mjpeg-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mjpeg-users
