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Team HuskerBoard
Hey guys,

If anyone needs a RAID 0,1,10 card with SATA let me know. They are Promise TX4200 with a cd, 3.5 disk, SATA cable and power cable dongle. I did not realize when I purchased the card on Ebay that is was for five and not just one. So I have four to give out. Let me know.

Rick

 
I'm just going by what the gurus have told me. This card allows you to hook up 2-4 sata hard drives and set them up as a raid array. With the Raid 10 array you hook up 4 identical hd's for both redundancy and better access to stored info. The expense is having to get the hd's. I am probably going to go with 4 smaller drives <200gb. Western Digital has some specific RAID drives but they are kinda pricey. But they are supposed to be more stable. :)

No rip off I paid for what I thought was 1 card and got 5 so if anyone wants one let me know. No charge just dont want to see your names on ebay selling the cards next week. :lol:

 
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That must be some porn collection you've got to need that much hard drive space! :lol: Personally I've only managed to fill one and a half drives, but to need 4!! :thumbs

But really, the super spiffy computer I bought a few months ago already has internal capacity for 4 SATA hd's, two slots filled right now with a total capacity of like 450gb.

 
I know I might be showing my ignorance here but what is a raid card? SATA is a type of hard drive, right?
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Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives.

RAID has a number of benefits other than sheer storage size - actually, except for RAID 0 (see below), you don't gain storage so much as performance, redundncy or both.

RAID 1 is "mirroring", in which you have two drives. As data is written to one drive, it is also written to the second drive, making them identical. With a good RAID card, if one of the drives fails, the other becomes bootable. Just replace the bad drive, and you can immediately have two identical drives again. Very handy.

RAID 5 is even better, in a way. That takes at least 3 disks. Instead of copying one disk to another, the paratiy information kept, allowing any of the remaining disks to recreate a failed disk. No single drive is "complete" - data is written across all the drives sequentially. Very robust.

There is a RAID 0 that has no redundancy, but is fast - gamers use it, particularly. Since data is shared across both drives, and each drive can have independent read/write operations, it doubles the seek and write times over a single disk (in theory).

 
I think that many mobo's SATA connectors can be used for DVD/CD sata units also not just hard drives. ???
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Well, yes and no (I know, I know - typical lawyer's answer). While you can use SATA in theory for optical drives, the problem is finding an optical drive that uses the SATA interface. I can only recall one or two. I haven't looked for any, but I think they are rare at this time.

 
The only one I know of at this time is the plextor dvd/cd drive. Saw it on Newegg.
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Yeah, that's a sweet drive. I may be wrong, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that SATA-intereface optical drives don't really benefit from SATA. Anyone know anything about that? I seem to recall the reason is that the maximum drive speed - the speed at which data flows from the drive to the interface and back (for writeable drives) isn't enough to tax the standard ATA interface.

 
The only one I know of at this time is the plextor dvd/cd drive.  Saw it on Newegg.
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Yeah, that's a sweet drive. I may be wrong, but I seem to recall reading somewhere that SATA-intereface optical drives don't really benefit from SATA. Anyone know anything about that? I seem to recall the reason is that the maximum drive speed - the speed at which data flows from the drive to the interface and back (for writeable drives) isn't enough to tax the standard ATA interface.
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Yea, I bet you are right in the optical drives benefitting from SATA department. The process data too slow to really be able to benefit from a higher controller <-> buffer speed.

 
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