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PCI IDE controller card

L

Lonyo

Lifer
I've ordered a PCI controller card (normal PCI) so I can add in a couple of spare drives I have lying around.
One is an ooold 5400rpm 34GB drive, the other is a 60GB 7200rpm drive.
I'm not expecting wonders from the 5400 drive, but will the 7200 rpm drive be hindered too much by being on the PCI bus?
I have my GFX on AGP, sound is onboard, but I am also going to be using a TV card when it arrives (at the same time as the IDE card).
Any problems with PCI bottlenecks? IIRC PCI offers 133MB/s of bandwidth, which *should* be OK for a 50mb/s sustained write/read on the HDD and maybe 30MB/s on the second HDD, then still have 30+mb/s on the TV card (worst case scenario).

How much is too much on the PCI bus?

(Software card running non-RAID mode)
 
I recently purchased a PCI ATA133 controller and have my two HDs on it with my two optical drives on the onboard channels. This puts a single device on each channel (ie, no slaves). Benchmarking before and after getting the PCI ATA card didn't reveal any change in sustained read/write performance.

I really don't notice much difference in speed compared to when I had all 4 drives on the onboard IDE -- but copying from one HD to the other is much improved since they aren't having to share bandwidth.

In addition to the ATA card, I've got a 9800P on the AGP, Santa Cruz PCI sound card, and a Leadtek Winfast TV tuner card.

I don't think the 7200RPM drive will be hindered -- mine are both 7200's 8MB cache drives and don't seem to be. I think you'll be fine.
 
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