Sata ide can you explain this for me pls?

[juliox]

Hello there, i came here some tiem ago asking for help i ended up buying a controller card for my raid 5 a ultra100tx2 and i never got it to work . now that i know a bit more about my computer i realized what was going on and tried to flash the bios however the bios updater hangs at 32% sigh any way my mobo came with sata allready ( those small black thingies with the black thin cable right ?) hahahaha. well now i own 4 250' Maxtors and a 200 segata . i wanted to raid up the 250s but my casrd just wont do so can you recomen another one please? and can you link a picture of a SATA hardrive please because ive seen alot fo hardrives and never one with slot for the funny looking black cable... any way thanks again for the info i hope that this post is beter than the one i posted long time ago. i will like to do a raid 5 ide becaus i can buy 250 gigs of maxtor for only 100 bucks sure they get *cough* warm but i can get fans np :). i think the sata hardrives will cost more right?

[Darthtanion]

SATA and IDE hard drives are priced very closely. Usually a SATA version of a hard drive will only cost $2-5 more than the IDE. Considering you get higher more bandwidth from the SATA pipeline, it makes sense to go that route.

As to the controller to use, I like Promise controllers because they are generally easier to set up. Since SATA is still pretty new, you shouldn't have to worry about updating the BIOS of the RAID controller right off the bat.

[Yawgm0th]

For SATA drives of that size there are additional features and speed bonuses that make them well worth the small premium, if there ven is any.

As for the controller, what motherboard do you have? It's possible that it has RAID 5, or at least some form of RAID (RAID 01 may be smarter if RAID 5 end up increasing the price too much).

I vaguely remember your first thread and recommending that card. If you couldn't get it to work, you should have come back here or to similar forums, or contact the manufacturer for help. Flashing the BIOS probably wasn't necessary. Did you try to RMA, anyway? Even if they won't take it back, it's about $25 and there's someone with more actual experience than I recommending the brand, so I wouldn't totally drop IDE RAID through PCI as a possiblity. Though by the looks of it, I had recommended you use software RAID for some reason since that card doesn't have any RAID functions.

In the event you need non-software RAID 5 via SATA (or even SCSI), the best solution may involve a new motherboard entirely (nForce 4), which would deal with the possibility of the PCI bus being a major bottleneck as well as provide a RAID 5 controller without needing any add-on cards.

[juliox]

thanks for your reply but i dint replay because my pc die shortly after this hahahha i will post here again when i get the pc fully fixed ( on laptop now ) and i will bring all the information thanks for your fast answers and sorry for not answering before