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Chipset Serial ATA RAID Performance Exposed
TheRaindog writes "Serial ATA RAID has become a common check-box feature for new motherboards, but The Tech Report's chipset Serial ATA and RAID comparison reveals that the performance of Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, and VIA's SATA RAID implementations can be anything but common. There are distinct and sometimes alarming performance differences between each chipset's Serial ATA and RAID implementations. It's also interesting to see performance scale from single-drive configurations to multi-disk arrays, which don't offer as much of a performance gain in day-to-day applications as one might expect."
Holyshit, at this rate I will have 1 new input per year. Why can't we wait a couple years and all agree on 1 super format.
Yeah, then they'll come out with double sided bluetooth and the upgrade cycle will start again!
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Must...Stop...Reading.
Remember the days when IDE/SCSI was all you needed.
Yeah, when all you had to worry about was MFM or RLL? ST506, IDE, E-IDE, Western Digital IDE, ATA, ATA-2, ATA-3, ATA-4, ATA-5, ATA-6, SCSI, SCSI-2, SCSI-3, Wide SCSI, Fast SCSI, Fast SCSI-2, UltraWide SCSI, Ultra SCSI-160? Connectors were just as simple; 40pin, 44pin or 80pin? 25pin D conector for external SCSI, male or female? How about a dense 50 pin D connector, or wait, maybe 64pin? 50 or 64 pin cable for internal drives; your choice.
Don't forget to setup your SCSI bus and wave that chicken. Does your SCSI controller boot from SCSI ID 0 or 7? Maybe 6 or 4? Did you set your master and slave jumpers on those IDE devices properly? Your IDE performance sucks; you didn't put a PIO device as a slave on the same channel as your screaming-fast UDMA166 120Gb hard drive now did you? By the way, does your BIOS support 48bit LBA for that drive? Got SCSI terminators. Need a terminator block or is it an internal jumper perhaps?
Oh boy, things were so much simplier back then..
Yeah, then they'll come out with double sided bluetooth and the upgrade cycle will start again!
Don't worry, I've already started work on a hole punch that will turn single-sided bluetooth into double-sided...
Well, that didn't last long
Dear god I'm having sysadmin flashbacks now. Gonna be thinking of sendmail.cf all day...
Bastard.
Well to be totally honest, proper configuration requires the blood sacrifice of a chicken at full moon, but if it's a single controller with a single device (And you have already installed the SCSI controller drivers) you can usually get away with simply swinging a live chicken near the drive to imbibe it with enough spirit that it will work.
Anything that involves mixing SCSI-2 and SCSI-3 devices, internal and external chains or RAID is a full chicken experience. If you're using anything made by Iomega, you'll need a goat and some black candles, too.
All of this is documented in the ANSI T10 SCSI-3 SBC-3 Configuration and Blood Sacrafice if you'd care to read it.
um, and if it aint just about transfer rates; May I enquire one thing?
what else are you looking for in a hard drive.
please share your wisdom, so n00bs and the alarming techies may know..
ATA should be enough for everybody right?
Forget ATA. What about MFM? Or RLL? Oh wait, this is slashdot. Everyone here was in diapers when these were used.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.