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Noob SCSI controller question

D

dajo

Senior member
Thinking of adding a second Cheetah 15K drive in RAID 0 on an XP Pro installation. I have an accout at Dell, so I'll probably purchase there since I can spread out my payments. They have the Cheetah 15k at a reasonable price, but the only SCSI controller I see is a "PERC3-DI RAID Controller Enabler Kit for Dell PowerEdge 2500", which supports RAID 0/1/5.

Product specs state that it is 160MB transfer, but I believe my drive is Ultra320. Are these numbers which I should be concerned about. The 160 means Ultra160, right? Should I look for a SCSI 320 controller - is there such a thing, or will it not really matter? My current controller is an LSI (160, I believe), but not a RAID card.

Does this sound like the controller I need? I just want to run in RAID 0 for speed. Also, I'm doing a lot of gaming lately. Would setting up a RAID 0 with Cheetah 15ks be good for this purpose, or problematic?

I've never set up a RAID situation so I don't know anything about it, and would appreciate any insight you might be able to give me.

Thanks!
 
Doesn't matter. U160 controllers exceed the bandwidth of your average 32-bit 33 MHz PCI slot already; going U320 makes no sense at all.

The LSI U160 controller is a fine product, but it won't do hardware RAID obviously. So either you run an operating-system-driven software RAID, or you indeed get a costly hardware RAID card that uses a RAID brain of its own, not "just" a SCSI engine.
 
Peter is right, a U160 will saturate a PCI bus. However, in about 6 months, there will be PCI-Express boards and PCI-Ex SCSI cards, and you won't be able to saturate that bus. I believe that the legacy PCI slots will still have a max bandwidth of 133MB/s though. Peace.
 
We've already had 64-bit and/or 66 MHz PCI slots for a looooong time, and all those U160 capable SCSI chips are capable of at least either. Just not on your joe average mainboard.
 
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