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Anyone know of a CDROM controller with more than 2 channels?

PostPosted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 7:59 pm
by wicked1
I am looking for a 6 channels or more preferably.I have seen quite a few 8 channel RAID cards but I dont think they are ATAPI compatible.

PostPosted: Sat Oct 11, 2003 8:58 pm
by BurninMan921
Lets see; 2 drives/channel, 2 channels/controller is normal. If you've got the PCI slots to spare, you can run more than one controller at a time-I had two Promise Ultra 100 cards in my system plus the onboard IDE (for a total of 12 drives possible).

PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 1:51 am
by wicked1
I am trying to get maximum throughput so I want to run the drives all 1 drive per channel.Did the promise 100s work better than the newer 133TX2 that everyone seems to agree doesnt work with opticals?If so off to ebay I go.I have tried my silicon image 680 with a promise 133TX2 and it wont boot.

PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 2:17 am
by BurninMan921
I haven't had any problems with either of my Promise cards-just make sure you grab the firmware update.

For the performance issue, it may be a non-issue: at 52x a CD burner is writing only 7800KB /sec-which is way under what even the old Ultra33 standard could do (33MG/sec). This is of course assuming you have a hard drive that can keep up; it's not so much the transfer rate, but seek time that will be the limiting factor. And, PCI has a max total bandwidth of 133MG/sec-put to much on it you will bog it down.

How many drives are you wanting to install total? And how many hard drives will you be pulling data from? Better make sure you have a heck of a power supply in the system...

PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 3:33 pm
by Action Jackson
Maximum PC did a test on the Promise 100 and 133 Tx2 cards.

There was next to no difference, in fact the 133 card was a bit slower on one of the tests.

PostPosted: Sun Oct 12, 2003 4:53 pm
by wicked1
BurninMan921 wrote:I haven't had any problems with either of my Promise cards-just make sure you grab the firmware update.

How many drives are you wanting to install total? And how many hard drives will you be pulling data from? Better make sure you have a heck of a power supply in the system...

I have an Antec TruControl 550 power supply.I am wanting to do multiple DVD complilations at once.I have 5 burners and 4 hard drives(3 160g 133mg/s and 1 250 100 mg/s) that I would like to get working nicely.I think I am going to go with firewire800.Anyone have any experience with them?It sounds like its the way to go with very very little processing overhead.I found some of the FireWire800 internal IDE adapters on sale so I figured go with it instead of FireWire 400.USB2 I want nothing to do with.