Thanks Lord Evermore --Little question about RAID and putting Devices on same channel...

[chynkboi]

Ok, simple little question...

I'm planning to do Software raid so I need another HD to boot off of... so,
If i put other devices on the same channel as another device on Raid, does it affect the performance?

Example:

Channel 1
-Raided HD
-Another HD

Channel 2
-Raided HD
-CDRW

How bad is it to have other devices along with the raided channels?
How much better if the Raided HDs had their own channels?



Thanks,
-Newbie Me

 

[Lord Evermore]

Only one ATA drive can be active on a channel at a time. So throughput is limited to the speed of a single drive on one cable. During accesses ONLY to the RAID drives, you'd notice no performance issues. But during CDROM transfers or copying to/from the other hard drive, your transfer rates will be killed. You might want to find a cheap cheap cheap PCI IDE controller that supports optical drives if you don't need great performance from the 3rd hard drive, so your RAID drives will be by themselves. Or take the step to a PCI ATA RAID controller, which isn't very expensive and makes it much easier to maintain RAID setups.