PCI IDE controller cards:

[f4phantom2500]

I have a motherboard with 1 IDE connector on it, and 2 PCI IDE controller cards, each with 2 ports. I also have an IDE DVD burner, 4 IDE hard drives, and 1 SATA drive. I want to use at least 2 of the IDE hard drives at any given time. I know that my drives are all ATA100, and the cables are ATA133. If I use the controller cards, assuming they're ATA100 or better and I put only 1 hard drive on each port, would my bandwidth be limited by the PCI bus at all or do they have some kind of work around that gives the drives enough bandwidth? Also, would there be any benefit in putting only 1 drive on the entire card in regards to bandwidth, even though there are 2 ports?

Thanks.

 

[Zepper]

Depends on your HDDs - newer ones could saturate the PCI bus, older ones probably not. One drive per connector is probably the best you can do. Just try it and see what happens.

.bh.

 

[ViRGE]

There are a lot of ifs here, but generally Zepper is right. What do you mean exactly by using two of the IDE drives at once though? I'm assuming you're going to be moving data between them, in which case you'll definitely be saturating the PCI bus, even if they're on the same card (HDs copy data my moving it from drive->RAM->drive, so for you it would be drive->PCI->RAM->PCI->drive).

 

[VirtualLarry]

In real-life usage, there really isn't much of a difference between putting both IDE drives onto the same IDE port on the same controller card, versus putting them on seperate ports on the same controller card, versus putting them onto seperate controller cards altogether.

There are two bottlenecks, one is the IDE port, at 100 or 133MB/s, the other is the PCI bus at 133MB/s. The bottlenecks are essentially the same, so it doesn't matter in which way you configure them. (This may have been different during the ATA-33 days, but for ATA-100 there is no measurable different that I've ever seen.)