OK Guys, looking for some input from hard disk performance gurus. I'm building a new computer based on Epox Nforce2. I got 2 identical Maxtor 40 Gig ATA133 drives and 1 Maxtor 80 Gig ATA133 drive, a DVD Rom, and a CD Burner. So count'm 5 ide devices.
Fortunately I also got other stuff. A promise fasttrack66 controller and a maxtor ata133 controller (installs in XP as "Promise Ultra133 Tx2) . So I got two options: 1) Hook both 40 gigers to the raid66 controller and setup raid (then connect 80 giger to the 1st onboard channel and the dvd/burner to the second) 2) Don't do raid and connect the 80giger to the 1st onboard and hook each 40 giger to an independent channel on the Maxtor ata133 controller and then the dvd/burner to the 2nd onboard channel. Question: which will be faster ?
The real issue is that the Raid Card is ATA66 and both of the 40 gig drives in the array are capable of ATA133. Peformance hit ? I've heard that the WinXP Nforce2 IDE Controllers are pretty good (Anandtech article a while ago). Would there be any noticeable performance gain by going to raid. And the Promise Ultra133 TX2 installs in XP as a SCSI controller so any device attached to them appears to XP as a SCSI device (no way to enable DMA must be done automatically). How would a SCSI drive configured this way compare to the onboard IDE controller in terms of performance ?
A little background will be running XP only. Don't do any photoshop or media creation that would make use of raid streaming features. Mostly surf, play games, e-mail, office stuff but looking for best performance (loading games).
Any ideas or recommendations.
RB
Fortunately I also got other stuff. A promise fasttrack66 controller and a maxtor ata133 controller (installs in XP as "Promise Ultra133 Tx2) . So I got two options: 1) Hook both 40 gigers to the raid66 controller and setup raid (then connect 80 giger to the 1st onboard channel and the dvd/burner to the second) 2) Don't do raid and connect the 80giger to the 1st onboard and hook each 40 giger to an independent channel on the Maxtor ata133 controller and then the dvd/burner to the 2nd onboard channel. Question: which will be faster ?
The real issue is that the Raid Card is ATA66 and both of the 40 gig drives in the array are capable of ATA133. Peformance hit ? I've heard that the WinXP Nforce2 IDE Controllers are pretty good (Anandtech article a while ago). Would there be any noticeable performance gain by going to raid. And the Promise Ultra133 TX2 installs in XP as a SCSI controller so any device attached to them appears to XP as a SCSI device (no way to enable DMA must be done automatically). How would a SCSI drive configured this way compare to the onboard IDE controller in terms of performance ?
A little background will be running XP only. Don't do any photoshop or media creation that would make use of raid streaming features. Mostly surf, play games, e-mail, office stuff but looking for best performance (loading games).
Any ideas or recommendations.
RB
Facebook
Twitter