PCI and Speed

[Dr J]

Hi,

I just purchased a pci board with four usb 2 connectors. By adding this pci board to my mother of a board, will it affect speed in any way, I mean negatively?

Also, if I have a backup drive on USB 2, am I able to boot from this drive, via this USB 2 interconnect, should my raid arrangement crash?

thanks,

John

 

[Ratman6161]

Originally posted by: Dr J
Hi,

I just purchased a pci board with four usb 2 connectors. By adding this pci board to my mother of a board, will it affect speed in any way, I mean negatively?

Also, if I have a backup drive on USB 2, am I able to boot from this drive, via this USB 2 interconnect, should my raid arrangement crash?

thanks,

John

No, adding a pci card will not affect the speed of other things in your system.

Weather or not you can boot from an external USB drive all depends on your motherboard and its bios. Mother boards have options for the boot order of your drives and all that I've seen recently will let you do this by setting the correct boot order in the bios. Many also have a key combination to press at startup, similar to entering the bios setup, that gives you a little menu to select this on the fly without changing the boot order in the bios.

but it all depends on your motherboard and its capabilities. I'd recommend you post your motherboard manufacturer and model number. based on that someone may be able to tell you. Or you may find it in the manual or by just browsing the bios settings.

 

[Peter]

Speed affected? No.

Boot from a drive on an offboard USB controller? Not going to happen.

 

[Dr J]

Can it be booted from an onboard USB controller?

thanks,

John

 

[Ratman6161]

Originally posted by: Dr J
Can it be booted from an onboard USB controller?

thanks,

John

Yes, thats what I meant - from a drive attached to the on board controller. Not the PCI card.

 

[Dr J]

So, just to be clear: if I attach the external desktop drive, via USB, to a mother board's onboard USB controller, then, I would be able to boot from this external device?

Yes or no would be fine. Sorry, easily confused.

thanks,

John

 

[Steve]

Yes

 

[Peter]

Originally posted by: Dr J
So, just to be clear: if I attach the external desktop drive, via USB, to a mother board's onboard USB controller, then, I would be able to boot from this external device?

If the board's BIOS supports boot from USB mass storage, then yes.

Mind that not all operating systems can live on a USB HDD. Windows XP for example needs some serious hacking to achieve that, while Linux can.

Also mind that USB performance, even if it's USB 2.0 "high speed", limits HDD throughput to about 30 MB/s, which is about a third of what current drives can do. If it's USB 1.x at 1 MB/s, you'll grow a long white beard before the system is getting to the desktop.