SuperMicro P4DCE - 2x 64bit PCI Controllers

[Ryan]

Wondering how much of a bennifit I would see if i put in a second raid card in the other 64bit slot + 4 more drives. I know it has to slots. But does it have to controllers?


My system

Super P4DCE
Dual Xeon 2.4
Escallade 7500-4
4x Maxtor 7200rpm 200gb HDD
80gb System Disk


I Want to add

Escallade 8500-4
4x 160gb SATA (or larger of some kind)

[rbartlett]

i860 chipset has one bus controller incarnation serving the PCI32 bus and another serving the PCI64 bus. Two PCI channels, one wide, one narrow plus the AGP.

Raptor 10k rpm drives instead of 160GB 7200s might make a swap worthwhile. Suspect going SCSI would be cheaper.

When you say better, you mean quicker when striped together- right? I suspect not.

The speed of the array won't be the sum of the parts, as the 3ware cards are PCI64@33, which equates to a ceiling (an idealised one at that) of 266MBytes/sec.

Try an Adaptec 39320, or an LSI 22320R and some Cheetahs. You will beat the random access performance of your existing stripeset with just two drives. You'll certainly beat it for speed with three 10k latest generation units.

If you had an E7505 based motherboard, you might have had some benefit in going for the second 3ware controller. E7505 (like X5DAL series and X5DA8) have two PCI-X buses, a PCI32 bus and AGP8x. If you were thinking of changing even more out for speed?

[Ryan]

I know that the SCSI drives are faster. But they are more expensive and very small. I currently have 800gb and I am running out of space almost daily. Space is the primary issue. Just wanted to know if I could get a performance boost while im at it.

Thanks for the info on the PCI buses. Looks like the best I could hope for is another 50mb per second.

A note on IDE drives.
They do have lower rotational speeds and access times. But the data is denser thus improving actual access times and throughput. The gap between SCSI and IDE is deceptive. In my experiance SCSI is almost always faster. But the differance isnt big enough for me to justify the smaller diskspace and larger price. I average 150+mb per sec off of my 4x raid-0 200gb maxtors. Cheap, big, and fast. I dont want to turn this into a IDE vs. SCSI thread, but I think that IDE RAID is often missunderstood.

Cool site if you didnt already know about it:

www.storagereview.com


Thanks Again
Ryan