jraneses

I'm considering getting this new Promise IDE RAID controller...it's got some awesome specs, however it's not widely available at the moment. Anyhow, it's got 4 seperate channels, and it's cheaper sibling the TX2 has only 2 channels. I'm planning on running RAID 0+1 with 4 75 gb 7200 rpm drives.

I know from reading up on RAID setups that it's best to give each drive it's own channel, but I have not seen much as far as benchmarks on what I stand to gain if I buy the more expensive controller.

It's either 4 * 2 drives per channel on the TX2, or 4* 1 drive per channel on the TX4. What I'd like to know is how real is the bottleneck on a 2 drive per channel setup and what percentage wise would I stand to gain if I moved to a 1 drive per channel config. Note also that this is running on a Gigabyte GA-7VTX motherboard, 1.4 ghz AYHJA stepping Athlon, and 512 mb PC2100 DDR RAM.

I'd appreciate any suggestions on which route to go. Obviously, without question, the TX4 will be faster, but I just need to know by how much (theoretically even). It's still about 2-3 weeks away from being available, at least from my searching over the past few days.

Regards,

Jason

Apex

Go check http://www.storagereview.com. The Promise card doesn't perform too well. Stick with the 3Ware.

jraneses

Thanks for your help...nobody else has responded. I'll look into 3Ware for sure. I was considering getting one for my Linux box a few months ago because the drivers were open source. I'll let you know how it works out.

Jason