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Hardware RAID and Serial ATA?

A

aic

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi all,
I want to know if anyone knows what the go is with Serial ATA and RAID. I am going to buy a RAID card for my Power Mac and talking to the guy i live with (who just got a serial ATA RAID system going) recons that if you get a Serial ATA RAID card you can use normal ATA hard drives and get a performace increase as the technology is in the card and the cable, not he HDD. Is this true or should i just buy a RAID card and laugh at him ?
 
im not really sure how thats possible. a RAID system [if its striped] is going to be pretty damn fast either way. i do know, however, that the Serial ATA HD's are rediculously expensive right now. id say just get a normal raid card.
 
Re: Hardware RAID and Serial ATA?

Originally posted by aic
Hi all,
I want to know if anyone knows what the go is with Serial ATA and RAID. I am going to buy a RAID card for my Power Mac and talking to the guy i live with (who just got a serial ATA RAID system going) recons that if you get a Serial ATA RAID card you can use normal ATA hard drives and get a performace increase as the technology is in the card and the cable, not he HDD. Is this true or should i just buy a RAID card and laugh at him ?
Click to expand...


You can buy a S-ATA RAID card and, w/adapters, hook up P-ATA HDDs, but you will not see a performance increase compared to using a normal P-ATA RAID. The speed bottle neck is the 7200RPM IDE HDD. The current gen of IDE drives *might* saturate an ATA/66 connection under some circumstances but they don't come anywhere close to using all the bandwidth of ATA100 or ATA133 (which both offer less bandwidth and S-ATA). W/o an S-ATA HDD you will not see a performence increase.


Lethal
 
Originally posted by adamfilip
how about a serial ata raid setup with 2 WD 10,000 rpm Raptor 36 gig hard drives. that would be sweet!
Click to expand...

i have got one on my newest pc rig, and yes... it is really sweet. sad that they don't make a serial ata raid card for mac, becuase software raids on drives like this just dont cut it.
 
just laugh at him. The hard drive is not gonna use the bandwidth, its useless to get a SATA card and P-ATA drives. Even SATA drives and a SATA card doesnt do much good unless you step up to the 10k Drives.
 
Originally posted by hugemullens
just laugh at him. The hard drive is not gonna use the bandwidth, its useless to get a SATA card and P-ATA drives. Even SATA drives and a SATA card doesnt do much good unless you step up to the 10k Drives.
Click to expand...

I beg to differ in specific situations only. The only time I think people should be looking at serial ATA AT THE MOMENT is if they are looking at high speed RAIDs with minimal costs. While the drives themselves would have a lot of trouble maxing out an ATA-100/133 bus, people in these situations would want to have a lot of cache (8MB is standard) and the cache would be able to utilise the extra speed.

In other words, if you have multiple drives on serial ATA, it is the cache that would get a good boost more than data coming off the drive itself.
 
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