Re: Hard Drives

[Richard Malcolm-Smith <rich@xxxxxxx>]

simonr@xxxxxxx wrote:

> It is unlikely that you will saturate the PCI bus, streaming data from
SATA
> hard drives using a PCI card. I use SCSI 160 HD's in my PC (10k Compaq
server
> drives) using a PCI card and the PCI bus does not get saturated (SCSI
transfers
> twice as much data as ATA as it reads and writes to the databus
synchronously).
> I have just finished helping a friend build a video editing machine
with 2 SATA
> PCI cards and 4 WD Raptors in it (It gets very hot !!!) and we have
had no
> problems there either.

Im my MP3/Movie server it definatly does saturate on the soft raid5 when
copying
to and from it. I only ever see 60megs a second write speed over the lan,
but on
the machine it will hit 80-90, If I move 2 of the drives to the onboard
sata it
goes up slightly in both cases. This is on a promise PCI card with 4 sata
channels.

> Be aware that sticking 2 160 Gb HDs in your dimension will produce a
fair
> ammount of heat inside the case (If you use 10k rpm drives these will
get so
> hot that you will not be able to touch them !!) You may want to look
at HD
> coolers or extra case fans. Dells run very quiet in general as they
use as much
> passive cooling technology as they can, figure on seeing upto another
20oc
> inside your case with you upgrade, this may impact on the temperature
that your
> CPU runs at (I had to upgrade my heatsink and fan when I started using
my scsi
> 160's !!)

Hell yeah, I have 4 seagate 7200s in my icute case with 4 fans infront,
without
them the drives were getting up to 55 degrees, too hot IMHO



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