Controller Card vs. Onboard

[StudyMTSU]

I am looking at building a system with a potential total of 6 IDE/ATA drives. Thus I am looking at adding a controller card because the motherboard can only handle 4 of such drives.

I have a couple questions regarding this.

1) Is there a performance difference between the onboard controller and a 66mhz PCI card based one?

2) Is there a better setup? My drives will be a mix of hard drives and CD/DVD players/burners. For example would it be better to have the hard drives on the onboard controller and the others on the PCI card or vice versa?

 

[galt]

1) As far as I know, the onboard RAID controllers are either chips that use a pci slot, or on the newer motherboards they are built into the south bridge. Either way, I haven't heard of one that makes use of a 66mhz pci bus or better. So I say a 66mhz pci slot add in raid card would give better performance (provided that your raid array actually transfers data that fast).

2) Some popular raid cards (like promise) suggest that you only use it for hard drives and to put the optical drives on the mobo ide slots. I say do the same. Its not like a cd drive will need a 66mhz pci card. Just put the cd drives on your mobo ide slots.

 

[madthumbs]

I've noticed that while burning dvd or cd while on the card, that the cpu usage goes way up. In fact, I couldn't burn dvd at 2x until I moved it to the onboard.

 

[tigerbait]

Originally posted by: madthumbs
I've noticed that while burning dvd or cd while on the card, that the cpu usage goes way up. In fact, I couldn't burn dvd at 2x until I moved it to the onboard.

I've noticed the same thing with my Promise Ultra 133TX2 card. When I burn a CD on my 48x burner, it constantly pauses to refresh a buffer and the CD takes about 6 minutes to burn, whereas when connected to the onboard IDE, the same CD would take 2-3 minutes.

Do hard drives slow down that much also when placed on a PCI controller?

 

[Sunny129]

i currently have an Abit IT7 max2 ver.2 mobo. it has an Highpoint 374 RAID controller chip in addition to two SATA connectors, for a total of 6 PATA/SATA devices. and i'm sure there are other motherboards that support 6 PATA/SATA devices, all of which are operated by IDE and serial channels, or onboard controllers. so you might not even need to look for a controller card.

 

[Matt84]

I've noticed the same thing with my promise PDC20276 controller chip built onto my motherboard. when accessing any drives on that controller the CPU utilisation goes through the roof and DMA is enabled.

 

[mindwreck]

i have a maxtor ata100(promise chip). When im transfer stuff around, my cpu only goes up to about 20% usage.. i probably got a good card...

 

[madthumbs]

"Promise Ultra 133TX2 card" -same thing here.

 

[tweeve]

I havent had any Problems with my addin RAID Card its a highpoint i dont remember the exact type. but i have no slow downs when burning things on to CD at 25X.

My cpmputer is a DELL 8200
CPU - 1.3Ghz P4
RAM - 1GB RDRAM 800Mhz
Video - 128MB GeForce 4 Ti 4200
Sound - Audigy 2
HDD - Addin Card RAID 0 two 120GB WD

I have no problems with my setup

 

[Mavrick007]

I would suggest getting a board that lets you use 6 or even 8 ide/ata drives.

You would have to get a specific mobo in order to get the potential out of that 66mhz/64bit card and this will limit you on mobos to choose from.