Soldato
Anyone any opinions on how decent the following storage box would be?
1x SiI3726 port multiplier (basically does all the raid logic away from the system its plugged into. Its has 5x internal sata plugs and can do raid 0,1 and 5) ~£40
1x SiI3132 SATA2 (the card that can talk to the port multiplier - in this case a PCI-e based card) ~£40
1x eSATA cable (single external SATA cable) ~£15
4x SATA drive of choice. 80GB drives from B-grade = £80 total
1x Box to house and cool the drives (can be done on the cheap with an ATX rigged to work like an AT PSU) = £20
Now that isnt cheap for only 320GB storage but...
With the above box you would have 4x 60MB (average max transfer from single drive, more like 75ish with a raptor). At lowest speed your still looking at around 20MB per drive at least.
You would have a sustained transfer graph from HDtach with SUSTAINED transfer starting at around 200MB/second (max of the 4 drives). With it being attached to a PCI-e card you have a bus that unless i've mis-read something would handle that sort of data throughput. The transfer graph would drop off to around 80MB/second but thats still faster than single raptor.
Seek times WOULD suffer but the basic setup and running would be awesome. The above is assuming raid 0 which is incredably risky but for the sake of scratch pad (cad software) use wouldnt be a huge problem. If you were being really anal about it you could even have another port multiplier box attached and run the 2 banks of drive arrays in a raid 0+1.
Im thinking about this more and more - unlikely to be something ill ever do but id love someone to have requirements for the sort of throughput this could handle so I could test it.
1x SiI3726 port multiplier (basically does all the raid logic away from the system its plugged into. Its has 5x internal sata plugs and can do raid 0,1 and 5) ~£40
1x SiI3132 SATA2 (the card that can talk to the port multiplier - in this case a PCI-e based card) ~£40
1x eSATA cable (single external SATA cable) ~£15
4x SATA drive of choice. 80GB drives from B-grade = £80 total
1x Box to house and cool the drives (can be done on the cheap with an ATX rigged to work like an AT PSU) = £20
Now that isnt cheap for only 320GB storage but...
With the above box you would have 4x 60MB (average max transfer from single drive, more like 75ish with a raptor). At lowest speed your still looking at around 20MB per drive at least.
You would have a sustained transfer graph from HDtach with SUSTAINED transfer starting at around 200MB/second (max of the 4 drives). With it being attached to a PCI-e card you have a bus that unless i've mis-read something would handle that sort of data throughput. The transfer graph would drop off to around 80MB/second but thats still faster than single raptor.
Seek times WOULD suffer but the basic setup and running would be awesome. The above is assuming raid 0 which is incredably risky but for the sake of scratch pad (cad software) use wouldnt be a huge problem. If you were being really anal about it you could even have another port multiplier box attached and run the 2 banks of drive arrays in a raid 0+1.
Im thinking about this more and more - unlikely to be something ill ever do but id love someone to have requirements for the sort of throughput this could handle so I could test it.
