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.

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.

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).