PCI bandwith

[SixEyedSmily]

Ok, i have a computer with an already sorely taxed southbridge,
at present it is supporting the onboard sound, a 3com lan card, a hauppage tv/video card (pvr-150) as well as an agp gfx card, 2 mirrored hard drives (os and programs) a dvd-rw and a single hd (data)

because that single data hd is where the video from the tv card is written to and read from, and it is a pretty cheap drive i often get stuttering when watching one file while recording another from the tv tuner.

the datarate of the mpegs is up to 6meg/seg depending on what quality i am recording at.

what i want to do is get an addtional raid controller (either an adaptec hardware one or an el-cheapo software one, i will decide based on a bit of cpu monitoring that i have yet to do) and buy an idetical hard drive to the existing cheap one, then stripe in raid 0 to get a bit more performance out of the storage sytem.

so far, all fine. however as i said there would then be an awful lot of bandwith going through that poor little pci bus and i was wondering if it would be able to cope.

the chipset is a via one (sadly), a p4x533.

I am not 100% sure of the maximum bandwidth that can go through a southbridge either.

does anyone know the answer to this?

 

[Peter]

Storage controllers on PCI are limited to roughly 95 MB/s, no matter who made the chipset.

When shifting MPEG2 data around, you're certainly not bandwidth limited - neither by drive nor by PCI nor by the north-south interconnect. You're most possibly experiencing latency problems from an unsuitable hard disk.

Thus, I'd rather consider buying a new hard disk for your media files. Samsung have a special series of low-revving quiet IDE drives for exactly that purpose - timeshifting TV, record-while-watching, etc.

The Samsung HA250JC drive is one of those, and its 250 GBytes should be plenty enough for the purpose.

 

[SixEyedSmily]

ok, 95 mb/s should be more than sufficent 🙂

i will have a look at that samsung drive, thanks for the info

xD