SCSI 320 card

[Emrys]

Does anybody know if there are currently any SCSI 320 raid cards in production and on the market yet?
Currently I am running 2 SCSI 320 drives on a regular 160 card(because that is what I had laying around).
Second, I haven't realy seen anything on the performance gain that would be had, and do you think
that the performance gain would be worth the money to upgrade if a card was out?
Oh yea, my SCSI card is not a raid card, but the drive I have will outperforme 2WD caviars on a raid0 aray, so
I am not too concerned.

Thank you

 

[GoSharks]

there would be no performance increse unless your two drives can saturate a u160 interface with data. this is not going to happen, as the current drives on the market do not provide sufficient transfer rates.

also, unless you have a 64bit pci slot on your motherboard, your pci to scsi card transfer rate would be limited to 133MB/s (theoretical). this is under the max limit of hte u160 interface, and well under hte u320 theoretical transfer rate.

*doh... missed the one word of "raid" in the original post*

 

[Apex]

The currently available Ultra320 SCSI Seagate Cheetah X15-36LP's burst at 80mbps and do a sustained 52-53mbps. A RAID 0 of 3 of them will saturate the U160 channel.

The LSI LSI21320 is a good U320 controller for not too much.

 

[mastertech01]

ATTO UL4D is scheduled to be released soon. Just a few weeks

 

[Apex]

I have a UL3D card and it's very fast. However, they still have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA when they'll have working Windows XP drivers. How pathetic is that?

 

[mastertech01]

I have the same Apex, as well as a couple UL2D. They dont have official XP drivers but the Win2K drivers work fine for me.

 

[Apex]

Unfortunately, they didn't work at all for me (850 chipset).

 

[mastertech01]

Not sure why they wont work with the 850, but Ive used them with my Tyan Thunder K7, and an Intel OR840. All I had to do was edit out all instances of Symbios from the textsetup.SI_ file, and boot up with the 6 XP Pro boot disks, then install the UL3D driver using the F6 function. As long as XP doesnt see Symbios in the textsetup, it will install the ATTOPCIExpress driver and see the array. Unless there is a conflict with the 850 chipset I am unaware of specifically.

Edit: if its simply a matter of being able to access the ATTO bios, you simply need to boot to DOS boot disk and run the config utility from a driver disk.

 

[Apex]

Tried that, as well as tried doing an upgrade from 2000 (eeeeew). Neither worked. Called ATTO tech support. They had no solution either.