cache drive/ pci-x slot question

[sacretagent]

HI all

 

I am getting more of the ucd virus, i am affraid and last few days made it a habbit of reading a lot of the new posts

 

now today there was somebody who had problems with speed after he had connected a IDE drive as cache but used an old cable ...

 

this got me thinking

 

ultimate goal for me is to get the 22 max drives in an enclosure preferably using the same mobo as i use now

 

mobo is an ASUS P5b-Plus vista edition

 

6 sata ports 3gb/s on an ICH8 chip

2 sata ports 3gb/s on a jmicron chip (1 sata/ 1 esata)

 

then the board has

 

3 x pcie-1x  slots where i can put in 2 sata ports adapters (have already 2 Adaptec AAR-1220SA's)

1 x pcie-16x slot where i want to put in a supermicro 8 ports card

2 x pci slots from which one will be used for an old pci vga card

 

so in the best possible configuration

 

8 onboard sata ports at 3gb/s

6 pcie-1x  sata ports at 3gb/s

8 pcie-16x sata ports at 3gb/s

--

22 drives at 3gb/s

 

now my question is the mobo also supports 2 IDE drives

but i also have still an older 2 ports sata I adapter for a pci slot which should run at 1.5gb/s (it was in this computer before)

 

if 4.7 or 5.3 would support a double parity drive would it be faster to put the cache drive on the IDE ports (IDE drive.. have a 500gb laying around somewhere) or would it be faster on the PCI 1.5gb/s SATA port between all the other traffic on the PCI channels

 

i know i am thinking far ahead but it sparked my interest and it would mean i don't need another mobo soon

 

 

[Carpet3]

The IDE hard drive and the PCI ports on your mobo are both limited to 133MB/s so no theoretical difference there.

 

The SATA card will likely add a small amount of latency (so small i'd doubt you'd even be able to measure it). I'm going to make the assumption that the SATA HDD you'd be putting on the card is going to be newer than the IDE HDD and so will likely be faster (most of the old IDE HDD never reached the maximum theoretical speed)

[Rajahal]

Dual parity drives won't be possible for quite some time, so I would forget about it for now.  As for the cache drive, either the PCI or IDE ports should work, as Carpet3 said, but I would also recommend using SATA drives whenever possible.  IDE drive aren't just slower, they suck up a lot more power too.  SATA over PCI will likely be a lot more reliable than an IDE to SATA converter.

[sacretagent]

Dual parity drives won't be possible for quite some time, so I would forget about it for now.  As for the cache drive, either the PCI or IDE ports should work, as Carpet3 said, but I would also recommend using SATA drives whenever possible.  IDE drive aren't just slower, they suck up a lot more power too.  SATA over PCI will likely be a lot more reliable than an IDE to SATA converter.

 

HI Raj and Carpet

 

thanks for the insights

 

i got carried away by tomm's answer here

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=10021.msg95453#msg95453

 

i thought it was the next thing up since the driver rewrite thread was also prgressing towards a solution

 

anyway i want to be prepared