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[TheTeacher]

I think the 100 TX2 is a KICK@SS RAID controller. It will operate on a 66MHz PCI bus. This is EXTREMELY good for overclocking. I get no HDD errors what-so-ever from high PCI bus like on regular onbaord controllers. As far as performance, compared to my Abit KT7A-RAID at 155MHz FSB I got 40,000 Points on SiSoft HDD Performance, on this card at 133FSB I get 43,000. Most others get 38,000 with their raid setup. Absolutely the easiest to set up HDDs on. It can even automatically do it for you. As far as spinning down the drives, I believe it is controlled by the BIOS ACPI management. Because when it goes into standy, the drives do stop or slow down. Plus, when you upgrade, you can use the RAID controller, unlike onboard when I changed RAID controllers, I had to delete all data on my drivers because RAID controllers are different and in most cases incompatible. I would say it was well worth the money I paid for it $118 overnighted. $81 regular. As for when I had my single HDD without RAID, I would score 21,000 SiSoft... Also, for a good tweak if using FAT32 when you format use this command to get about 10% increase in all areas of HDD IE: Access times, and data transfer rates...
format c:/z:64 or use whatever drive instead of C anyways, what this does is specify the sector size to 32 (supposed to be 64 but microsoft won't do 64 so it gets cut in half, 32 gives you 16 etc.. etc... etc... This allows more data to be read faster, and faster search times. It will read in larger blocks. The downside is that you will lose space when compared to the default setting of 8KB for a primary drive and 4KB for any drive letter other than C. My 20GB is now 18.5GB ohh what a loss... =) That gives me what a 30GB and 10GB partition left for data storage that don't have to be super fast.

Mike

 

[Gracki]

Thanks a lot Mike,

I appreciate the detailed response. So just to get it straight, the hard drives definently do spin down? This is just a major concern of mine because I plan on leaving my comp on for long periods of time and I would like to get a long life-span out of my new hard drives (if I buy them).

Thanks again,

Greg

 

[TheTeacher]

I just went into sleep mode to see if they do, and they do.
Mike

 

[Gracki]

Thanks for the time, I really do appreciate it.

-Greg

 

[chainbolt]

I 100% agree on this. I also have the 100 TX, it's definitely better than the on-bioard controllers, because you can hook on 4 drives, and you have all ROAD functions, not on only 0 and 0+1. The TX runs at 66MHz, but only of your board supports this. Currently only some server mobos, such as from Tyan have such a PCI speed. I think none of the AMD 760 boards would run PCI at 66Mhz, even if you overlock FSB MHz.

I can also confirm that you can w/o any problem upgrade from a Fasttrack 100 to a Fastrack 100 TX. YOU CANNOT access the on-board Fasttrack 100 Lite drives when hooked
on to the PCI Fasttrak 100 or TX controller.

 

[TheTeacher]

If I set my jumper for 100MHz Bus, then overclocked it to 190MHz it would be damm close to a 66MHz pci... LoL I think it is at 45.25 right now. I just like the fact that I know it can handle it.
Mike