Lesser of two evils?

[batmanuel]

I'm getting ready to get rid of one of my systems (probably going to part it out on FS/FT), but I want to use the 120GB hard drive in my newer system for extra storage until I can get the funds from selling the old system and buy some new drives. The problem is that the newer system is on an Intel 915PBL board that only has one ATA133 channel.

What would hurt the performance of the drive worse: 1. Putting in as the slave drive on the single ATA channel with the DVD+RW or 2. slapping in a spare Promise ATA66 controller I have laying around and giving the drive its own channel? The drive is a WD1200JB w/ 8MB of cache, but I'm not sure if it has enough burst performance to be bottlenecked by the ATA66 card.

I'm mainly looking to increase storage as cheaply as possible, and maybe get the added performance benefit of having the data and OS/apps on different drives.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: batmanuel
I'm getting ready to get rid of one of my systems (probably going to part it out on FS/FT), but I want to use the 120GB hard drive in my newer system for extra storage until I can get the funds from selling the old system and buy some new drives. The problem is that the newer system is on an Intel 915PBL board that only has one ATA133 channel.

What would hurt the performance of the drive worse: 1. Putting in as the slave drive on the single ATA channel with the DVD+RW or 2. slapping in a spare Promise ATA66 controller I have laying around and giving the drive its own channel? The drive is a WD1200JB w/ 8MB of cache, but I'm not sure if it has enough burst performance to be bottlenecked by the ATA66 card.

I'm mainly looking to increase storage as cheaply as possible, and maybe get the added performance benefit of having the data and OS/apps on different drives.

Stick with the ATA100/133 controller. It may or may not have the burst speed, but there is an improved protocol in the ATA100 Spec that will help the drive perform slightly better. Also it has been a general rule of thumb to never slave a hard drive to any kind of optical or removeable media drive. Keep the Hard Drive as the Master Device. If you run out of space to accomodate your optical drives then use a ATAPI compatable controller card for $10-20 or you can find one on ebay for less than that.

 

[batmanuel]

Now that you mention moving the opticals to a controller card, I just realized that I could probably use the Promise Ultra66 controller for the optical. That controller doesn't really work all that well for ATAPI devices, but since the DVD+RW uses an Ultra 33 interface instead of ATAPI, it should work just fine on the older controller. I haven't been able to dig up any Windows XP drivers for the Ultra66 card, but I bet the WinXP probably supports it natively to begin with. Thanks for your help.

 

[batmanuel]

Double post.

 

[Googer]

Originally posted by: batmanuel
Now that you mention moving the opticals to a controller card, I just realized that I could probably use the Promise Ultra66 controller for the optical. That controller doesn't really work all that well for ATAPI devices, but since the DVD+RW uses an Ultra 33 interface instead of ATAPI, it should work just fine on the older controller. I haven't been able to dig up any Windows XP drivers for the Ultra66 card, but I bet the WinXP probably supports it natively to begin with. Thanks for your help.

RAID Cards are not intended to work with Optical drives, they are hard drive specific. For an optical drive you will need an HBA in place of a RAID.

 

[batmanuel]

Originally posted by: Googer

Originally posted by: batmanuel
Now that you mention moving the opticals to a controller card, I just realized that I could probably use the Promise Ultra66 controller for the optical. That controller doesn't really work all that well for ATAPI devices, but since the DVD+RW uses an Ultra 33 interface instead of ATAPI, it should work just fine on the older controller. I haven't been able to dig up any Windows XP drivers for the Ultra66 card, but I bet the WinXP probably supports it natively to begin with. Thanks for your help.

RAID Cards are not intended to work with Optical drives, they are hard drive specific. For an optical drive you will need an HBA in place of a RAID.

It's not a RAID card, it's just a regular UltraATA 66 add-in card, so it might work. I figure it's worth a try to hook it up, run some Nero tests and see if it works corrently. It's just a pain that Intel only put a single ATA133 connector on the board.