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To use or not to use Promise ATA Controller Card

H

homestarmy

Diamond Member
In the past, I have used this Promise ATA-100 controller card on almost every PC I have used, it has been a great little thing, normally faster than having the HDDs plugged directly into the motherboard. I also like that they can be on their own channels, apart from the DVD-Burners.

Note that I tend to like to burn two DVDs at a time from two different hard drives (normally connected to the Promise Card) to two different DVD Burners (normally connected to the motherboard).

The new motherboard that I have is an Asus K8N-E Deluxe. Though it has SATA, all of my stuff is still PATA. Should I connect it the way I have in the past? Or will the HDDs be faster on the motherboard than on the Promise card? And if that is the case, should I still use the promise card to get the Burners on a seperate channel from the hard drives for the type of burning that I like to do?

Any insights very much appreciated!!
 
Connect the HDD on the mobo. Not sure if you can connect the burners to the Promise ATA-100. It's always best to have the HDD and burners on a separate channel (as you mentioned).

Do a comparison test and hook the HDD on the mobo, burners on the card and then vice versa. See which combo is faster.
 
The miserable PCI bus on a standard mainboard has been slower than the chipset integrated IDE ports for a LONG while.

Move to SATA harddisks, and put the DVD drives onto the IDE channels.
 
First, I know that the burners will work on the ATA card, that's not an issue (I've used optical drives on it before).

Second, previously I had been using cheaper motherboards such as the Socket A L7S75A by ECS and from when I tested, it was definately faster on the Promise card. By a long time, do you mean post-socket A?

And as far as moving to SATA Harddisks, that's not really an option. I have a ridiculous amout of HDD storage on PATA already. I have also failed to see any reasons to move to SATA as of yet, with the exception of cabling/ventilation and the channel issue, which this Promise card will resolve anyhow.

Also, I have been getting these hard drives for generally around $30 for a 250GB and $20 or less for a 160... this is why I can't be made to buy SATA. Please point me in a direction that shows a real world advantage with SATA however. But I'll be able to RAID and probably beat that advantage (which I will likely do shortly).

I put the I in RAID INEXPENSIVE 😉.
 
Keep in mind that the throughput of chipset-level SATA (and, for that matter, PATA) controllers is higher. The maximum PCI bandwidth is 133 megabytes per channel. Depending on implementation, you're going to see 80-110 mb/sec maximum. This is SHARED bandwidth, all the PCI slots together have that throughput.

For comparison, a modern hard drive can transfer over 60gb/second in SUSTAINED throughput over the outer zones of the disk. So, if you have two hard drives in RAID (being accessed simultaneously) on a PCI RAID card, you can oversaturate the PCI bus. Your sound skips, if you have a PCI-based network card, it drops packets, your TV capture card loses frames, etc etc etc.

On the other hand, SATA ports provided by the chipset have a much higher bandwidth connection. The speed of the interconnect between the chipset and processor in a modern Athlon64 motherboard is 6.4 GIGABYTES per second. A pair of SATA2 hard drives going at 300mb/sec MAXIMUM speed (and 60mb/sec maximum attainable speed) won't make a dent.

If you're all about filling out rebate forms, by all means be my guest 🙂 However, spending an extra $50 may seem extravagant for just a hard drive, but, in the context of a $1000 machine, it could net you more than a 5% performance improvement in certain tasks. Never mind the ease of cable routing, cooling, modern PSU's skimping on Molex connectors in favor of SATA, NCQ capabilities, and hot-swap capabilities.
 
Originally posted by: homestarmy
First, I know that the burners will work on the ATA card, that's not an issue (I've used optical drives on it before).

Second, previously I had been using cheaper motherboards such as the Socket A L7S75A by ECS and from when I tested, it was definately faster on the Promise card. By a long time, do you mean post-socket A?
Click to expand...

I don't know what you tested, but PARTICULARLY on SiS chipsets, the integrated IDE channels are a long way faster than anything on PCI could possibly be. No way around it, on 32-bit 33 MHz PCI, storage controllers are limited to ~95 MB/s throughput - while fully saturating the bus.

Even in socket-A days, SiS had a 1 GByte/s uplink from the southbridge into the northbridge, allowing BOTH (!) IDE channels to run flat out without saturating anything.

 
Well that about answers it then!

So it will be the HDDs directly connected to the motherboard! The DVDRW drives shouldn't have an issue saturating the bus through the PCI card, should they?

Also, while we're on the topic, I'm thinking of toying with RAID (as I had mentioned).

This is going to be a dumb question most likely: If I want to do a RAID 0 or RAID 1 setup via the onboard PATA Channels, is this done via the same IDE cable with both drives attached or with each as a master on seperate channels? Can it be done either way?

I know the basics of RAID as far as the drives need to match and all, but I haven't actually tried it yet...
 
Two IDE devices on the same cable can't share the cable's bandwidth. This is inherent to how IDE works - so even if each of the two is much slower than the DMA mode would allow, the drives are only mutually accessible.
Thus, you should put each drive onto its own cable. RAID software typically doesn't care what's where though.
DVD drives will certainly not saturate the PCI bus.
 
Thank you very much for the information!

I guess the problem there then would be that if they are taking up the two IDE ports on the motherboard, I wouldn't want to put another hard drive in there as a slave on one, because then it would be uneven and just not a good idea... no?

Maybe RAID isn't for me...
 
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