3ware controllers...

[JerryH]

Having had less than stellar luck with the HPT-370, I'm looking into another RAID card. I had a Promise-33 before and it worked great, but I'm wondering how the 3ware Escalade 7000-2 (7500 series?) compares in the price range (about $140) to the latest Promise cards.

Are the Escalade cards true hardware raid, or are special drivers needed?

[WayneHu]

Re: 3ware controllers...

Originally posted by JerryH
Having had less than stellar luck with the HPT-370, I'm looking into another RAID card. I had a Promise-33 before and it worked great, but I'm wondering how the 3ware Escalade 7000-2 (7500 series?) compares in the price range (about $140) to the latest Promise cards.

Are the Escalade cards true hardware raid, or are special drivers needed?

If you do not have 64-bit PCI slot, 7000 might not give you the best C/P value.

I tried one set of RAID1 WD1000BB on 6410 and a single drive on the same controller. I just can say that the performance of this combination is no worse than the one by 2~3 IDE controllers. The 6410 performs just like 4 independent IDE controllers.

On single HPT 370a, 372, FastTrak66, or ICH2, the disk I/O is slowed down when there are concurrent I/O transactions on channel #1 and #2, which there is just one drive attached on.

[UtwigMU]

People on www.storagereview.com forum seem to like them.

[Marshmallowman]

abit + highpoint = bad

never had a problems with my epox kt133a + hp370
but I have heard a LOT of problems about abit kt7's in general
In general via chipsets do not handle RAID very well.

having said that a RAID controller from a decent manufacturere should be a lot less problematic (promise or highpoint)

[Wombat]

abit + highpoint = bad

I prefer ( Abit || Highpoint) = bad

[Marshmallowman]

Woah!!

that 3ware escalade controller looks EXCELLENT.

they are not true hardware RAID, but expect to double if not triple the price for real hardware RAID.

looks like might have found my next RAID controller

Thanks for the headsup

[Dr Mordrid]

Marshmallowman;

Don't get too excited as this market is going to heat up, and soon

Dr. Mordrid

[MultimediaMan]

Doc Mod is right... Adaptec, Promise, and maybe one or two others are going to come on strong... And we get to buy the good.

Promise is gonna be the odds-on favourite for an affordable RAID solution and let's hope, RAID 5 in SATA.

[JerryH]

Doc Mod is right... Adaptec, Promise, and maybe one or two others are going to come on strong... And we get to buy the good.

Promise is gonna be the odds-on favourite for an affordable RAID solution and let's hope, RAID 5 in SATA.

Please inform...I've been out of the loop for a while (maybe I was never in it, ). It sounds like this Serial ATA is going to revolutionize IDE and HD's in general?

[Dr Mordrid]

SerialATA uses much smaller cables instead of the bloated parallel cables we've been using. It will also be faster; a bit right away and quite a bit faster later on. Legacy ATA drives can be used with SerialATA cables using a dongle.

SiS is first out of the box with SerialATA support in their new chipsets. Neither Intel or VIA are even close.

Shuttle will be using both parallel and SerialATA on their new AS45 (SiS 648 chipped) P4 board. Here's the pertinent page in THG's preview of the SiS 648 chipset;

http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q3/020720/sis648-04.html

Recommended reading: the whole SiS 648 article;

http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q3/020720/index.html

Dr. Mordrid

[Taz]

GamePC have done a review of 3Wares first Serial ATA RAID controller which may be of interest

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_cont...ookie%5Ftest=1