Abit's New Motherboard Lays On The Ports

An enthusiastic reader submits: "Possibly the most innovative motherboard to be released in years, Abit's MAX series intends to dive headfirst into the next generation of computing, leaving legacy ports behind in their dust. Hardcoreware.net has the first full review of this board, which has support for 10 USB devices and 12 (YES, 12) IDE devices." I wish it had even more built-in USB ports, but six is a good start.

Comments

The abit website

[young-earth]

For those who are unaware, the Abit website is NOT www.abit.com; that reroutes you to motherboards.com. The site you want is www.abit-usa.com or www.abit.com.twinstead.

ABIT's Media Sheet

[svferris]

Here's a link to ABIT's media sheet on the motherboard, which gives a good rundown of the new features of the board, as well as what they were thinking when designing it.

ABIT MAX Media Sheet

Re:Makes you wonder

[freakinPsycho]

Sure, there's not much difference in price.. really..

Check out pricewatch, here's a sample:

~40 gig
Scsi: $124
IDE: $54

~80 gig
scsi: $443
IDE: $90

160 gig IDE: $197
$180 gig SCSI: $999

Nope, not much price difference there.

I want a lot of storage space, so I bought a mobo with onboard raid. This is not so that I can quickly access a large amount of information, but so that I have somewhere to store all kinds of crap (MP3's, etc).

I also use the extra IDE slots so that I can have more stuff in there (DVD rom, cd-jutebox, CD-RW, windows drive, BSD drive, etc).

I'm not going for speed, I'm going for bulk. So yeah, I could upgrade to SCSI. I'd spend a crap-load of money and not really gain anything, since I don't do anything that is IO heavy. Everything I do is CPU/Memory heavy. SCSI doesn't help me there.

SCSI has its place, but I don't need it. I'm happy with my ability to stick a bunch of IDE drives into my computer and play with it like that. I have a board with 4 IDE channels, 2 1/2 of which I use. I don't need SCSI.

USB absolutely uses DMA

[Johannes]

I don't know where you're getting your information, but all 3 common USB host controllers (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI) use bus mastering DMA to transfer the data from the device to main memory.

Go check the USB host controller specs for yourself.

Re:Funny....

[BrookHarty]

Why not just get a "USB TO SERIAL CONVERTER DB25M", its even supported under linux. I wanted to do this for a bbs, but the price per unit 45 bux was a little expensive.

Re:Terabyte system for the masses?

[Paul Komarek]

Not that you were going to rush out and set up your terabyte array, but here's a word of caution anyway. Terabyte filesystems aren't that common among Linux and FreeBSD users (which I know for sure; I'll bet NetBSD users aren't real interested, either...;-) That means they aren't well tested. Furthermore, there are limits to what is supported. For instance, the 160MB drives aren't supported in linux 2.4 yet, and filesystems have maximum sizes.

Before anyone decides to invest heavily in a terabyte+ array thinking they'll access it as a single logical device, I recommend investing some time reading the linux kernel mailing list, or do similar reading for the OS of choice. Along with some friends, I've spent a lot of time looking at these issues lately, and there are a lot of "gotchas" for unwary users (which almost included us).

-Paul Komarek

Cost effective? Let's compare.

[Chas]

IDE

160GB x 12 = 1920GB (1.920TB) (Due to HD reporting, it'll actually be about 1.788TB for real.)

Disk System Price: $2400

Options?

1. The 160GB disks are only 5400rpm and have 2MB cache. Drop to 120GB disks and you can get a 7200rpm disk with 8MB of cache.
2. Use the IDE RAID

SCSI

181.6 x 30 = 5448GB (5.448 TB) (Due to HD reporting, it'll actually be about 5.073TB for real.)

Disk System Price: $30,230 (With DC controller.)

Options?

1. The 181.6GB disks are 7200rpm (albeit with 16MB cache). You can drop to the 72/73GB disks and get 10K and 15K disks for half than HALF the price. Even though said drives will probably only mount half the cache, the average seek times will be approximately HALF that of the higher capacity drive.
2. Buy a DC SCSI >B>RAID controller instead of just a standard SCSI controller.

Basically, it all REALLY depends on what you want to do with the system. That and take a look at any of the recent comparisons between SCSI and IDE drives (especially the aforementioned 120GB WesDig JB drives).