Serial ATA RAID 5 solution! hot?

[autodestruct]

I read an article, I think over at StorageReview.com, that indicated the same. Using both channels of an IDE port (master and slave) didn't significantly affect the throughput. BUT, when using RAID 5, you'll be SOL if a single channel goes. If either a master or slave drive goes, both drives on that port get knocked out, bringing down your RAID-5 array. So much for redundancy.

I bought a Promise SX4000 last year. Had an XOR engine, plus a DIMM slot for cache, and 4 independent IDE channels. Unfortunately, they don't have Redhat 8.0 drivers yet, so its sitting collecting dust, along with the 200GB drives I bought for it.... Come on, Promise! Get your act together!

 

[deeznuts]

Originally posted by: Monotaur

Originally posted by: PuckMan
Okay, on further analysis...
....
Now, all of the above is valid with the exception of two points (which may be significant!)

1 - For the RAID adapters that allow two drives on the same channel, the maximum transfer rate you can get from two drives is 116MB/s, which is less than the 133MB/s transfer rate you get with ATA-133, still no bottleneck.
a. From PuckMan's law of thermo-datanics ;-> there is no way you will even get there because:
i. You only get the 58MB/s on the outer tracks of the drive, the drive will get slower as you do I/O from the inner cylendars
ii. Master / Slave sux, thus, you won't get to use all the bandwidth anyhow as only one drive can use the cable at a time!
...
Expecting various flames

The PuckMan

I guess it's a little OT, I'm prety sure that the transfer rate of hard drives in constant regardless of cylindar position.... this is why physical sector size is variable (to allow a specific arc length to contain the same amount of data regardless of position)... but maybe I'm wrong?

transfer rates are higher on the outer edges of the cylinder. check out reviews at storagereview