Couple of Raid and Serial ATA Q's

[saidin]

1. Can you use the Raid ATA ports for one harddrive, just like a regular IDE connector, or do you have to connect both drives? I am curious and do not have RAID to test this out.

2. Is the serial ports that are on the newer mobo's going through the PCI bus....meaning the will be limited by the smaller bandwidth, or will the new serial ATA equipped mobos be able to do 150MB per sec?

3. Which is a better Raid chipset, High point or Promise?

That is it for now. I apologize if any of these seem like really stupid questions? and thanks for input :)

[Wiggo]

1/ Most RAID controllers will act as plain IDE channels but some are fussy about the drives that will work on them, other than hard drives of course. ;)

2/ Yes it seems like the first version of Serial ATA will be limited by the PCI bus which is not real good now as the PCI bus has been taken away from north to south bridge comuntications now. :(

3/ Highpoint is the better choice atm as Promise controllers are the ones that have problems when ROM drives are attached to them most often.
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[saidin]

I think initially I am going to use the raid controller on my mobo for just one harddrive. And use the two "regular" ide channels for my dvdrom and cdrw. (Later I will probably RAID the SATA, hehe)

I am kind of disappointed that the initial offerings of SATA will be going through the PCI bus. Between that and the 9700 not working with 8x AGP, I am wondering why I am waiting for the ABIT AT7 Max2 mobo :mad:

So, what will the PCI bus limit SATA to?

[Wiggo]

I'd be surprised to see any performance benefit to start with but by the time of the introduction of Serial ATA II benefits should start to show themselves worth it. Mainly big name PC asemblers want to start early with Serial ATA to reduce the cable clutter in their small mircoATX systems and improve cooling. :smokin:
<center>:cheers:</center>