Building PC advice 3

[pnrenton]

In building a new PC I am considering the following: ASUS P4PE with RAID and SATA. My questions are:
1. Anybody have a good rec for a compatible, quality, quite case?
2. I'd like to place 2 HDD's on the RAID 1 for performance and get a 3rd HDD on the IDE for system backup. Is this a problem?
3. I can't find SATA HDD's yet. I know that the SATA concept holds a lot of promise but I've seen reviews that show little performance improvement over parallel ATA because of the PCI bus bottleneck. Does anyone have experience or recommend them or should I forego the SATA and stick to a parallel ATA RAID controller?
4. What is the HDD size limit for WinXP using NTFS?

 

[tempo21]

1. antec, cheiftec, lian li

2. no problem, aim for on board raid rather than PCI card.

3. you could wait for SATA raid, or you could go for ATA133 raid. number 2 applies again.

4. Is there a limit ? I doubt its been reached by HDD manufacturers. T3/\/\p()
tek-tips UK branch!
_________________

http://www.tempocentral.com

 

[Accessdabbler]

4. Yes, I believe that it's 127MB (limit of INT13 extension). Hard drives larger than this need to be partitioned into 2 or more pieces.

If I'm wrong, please say so.

 

[pnrenton]

Many thanks for the advice!

 

[Accessdabbler]

Ooops !! That should have been 127GB not MB.

 

[cdogg]

Accessdabbler,
Close!! Actually, the limit is 137GB. IDE hard drives that exceed this limit must have a BIOS and chipset that support larger capacities. Otherwise, you must use a PCI IDE controller that uses 48-bit addressing.

If you have an Intel chipset (810-860), then you can go here to download Intel's Application Accelerator:

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/iaa/

~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[cdogg]

Partitioning will not get around this barrier...you'll risk data loss if you try!! ~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[ceh4702]

Abit had a raid model IT7-Max or IT7-Max2. One of their models comparable had 4 Raid EIDE channels. I think they will come out with some adapters for the older hard drives so you can use the SATA PLUG and cable on a normal drive and achieve at least ATA 100 seeds. They were estimating a delivery date of around October for these drives, but I havent seen any for sale. Highpoint said they had an adapter like this that they sold with their SATA Raid Card, Rocket Raid 1500. Hopefully I got the model right.

The method of going from the parrallel (ATA) to Serial (SATA) is accomplished through UART. It is pretty common and straight forware and incorporated in most hard drives. I think the concept of SATA may just be skipping accomplishing this process on the motherboard SATA controller chip. Parallel is suppose to be faster but the signals fade fast. SATA or serial is slower, but can achieve longer distances with less errors and error correction. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[Accessdabbler]

Doing some reading about the 137GB barrier and I found some puzzling information. One source said that 137GB was the limit as INT 13h extensions used 28-bit addressing. The other source said that the extensions used 64-bit addressing for an 8 TB (yes, that's terabyte) HD limit.

Did I miss something here?

 

[cdogg]

The comparison is between 28-bit addressing (the old standard) and 48-bit addressing (the new standard based on LBA). Many PCI add-in IDE Controller cards, BIOS upgrades, and newer chipsets offer this new 48-bit addressing which has an upper limit of 144 petabytes (or 150,994,944 gigabytes).

Just thought this info might come in handy. Also, the SCSI interface doesn't have this limitation and Serial ATA will soon replace the current Parallel ATA interface.

More about the barrier here:

http://www.wdc.com/library/eide/137Barrier.asp

http://www.pc4d.com/hardware/68/a_interface_standard_that_breaks_the_137gb_barrier.shtml

~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein

 

[tempo21]

so 137 is the limit. I was just about right, not too many disks > 120gigs.
Has anyone tried this SATA ? Is it noticeably faster and how does it compaer to SCSI ?
T3/\/\p()
tek-tips UK branch!
_________________

http://www.tempocentral.com

 

[cdogg]

Have a look for yourself:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/02q3/020812/index.html

From what I can tell, there's no major difference between ATA/133/100 IDE drives and SATA drives. It's the same hardware running on a different interface. Until IDE drives become faster, SATA won't have much of an advantage. SCSI still dominates with its 10,000RPM drives and RAID configurations (but for a much higher price of course). ~cdogg

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- A. Einstein