Controller Card Advantage...

iSDn · Post by **iSDn** » Wed Apr 16, 2003 5:59 pm

It depends on which controller you want...be a little bit more specific.

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Thu Apr 17, 2003 6:53 am

Speed of the hard drives attached to the controller and the speed the of the controller itself will determine the overall performance boost. Having two high-speed controllers will definitely give you a performance boost. You can have your OS/applications on one drive and redirect your pagefile to a drive on the other controller. I do this with all my systems.

hyperspace · Post by **hyperspace** » Fri Apr 18, 2003 8:37 am

The two sockets are actually two channels for the controller. If you use a PCI controller for your OS/applications, then you could use the on-board controller for the pagefile. This is what I meant. Your 5400 RPM hard drive may respond a little better but you will not see any major performance boost. You would need a faster hard drive to see greater performance gains with a newer controller.

Many BP6ers use controllers from Promise. Here is a link to their WEB site.

www.promise.com

They have produced many different models over the last couple years. You may be able to find an older model for cheap that will give a good performance boost over the on-board BP6 controllers.

vgoraz · Post by **vgoraz** » Sat Apr 19, 2003 6:48 pm

If you wish to get real real technical and such, controller cards are at a slight disadvatage to ones built into southbridges (or northbridges or anyplace else you wish to connect them). having it attached onto a pci slot makes it have to share the bandwidth of the pci slot with everything else, which given a good enough hard drive could limit its performance. a built in one can use up the internal links of a motherbaord (such as V-Link, hypertransport, and other such things). of course on a bp6 we dont have any fancy internal links like this so it really makes no difference to us. besides even with it all i doubt you would get much of a seeable performance difference without a mass amount of high performance scsi drives in which cause you wouldnt be able to put that much scsi functionality into a southbridge.
as a disclaimer, i am also only a junior in computer engineering, so what i said might actualy be wrong. time to go back to doing large amounts of pspice for homework

kuun · Post by **kuun** » Mon Apr 21, 2003 2:27 pm

ok here is a tip i learned by doing

i have a 60GB 5400 RPM Western Digital drive

with a conventional IDE cable i'd get about 16mb/s sustained..

well i came across a 80D IDE cable (it has 80 pins but it still plugs into the conventional 40 pin slots)

i am now breaching 24-25MB/s sustained (continuous not burst)

thats my tip for the day

Kuun