Video system recommendations

[Karen St Martin]

John,

On the issue of RAID controllers I have to both agree and disagree with Dr M.

I agree with him in that there is no way I would put a Highpoint controller on my system. Benn there, done that, didn't like the results.

I disagree on the general issue of imbedded RAID controllers, at least as far as the Promise one on the 8ITXR board is concerned. I am currently building another system based on that board for a friend. This will be my 3rd 8ITXR based system and so far all of them have functioned flawlessly.

When all is said and done, as long as one is not considering Highpoint, it is probably 6 one way and half a dozen the other on the on-board controller vs PCI controller question.

Karen

[Phil Pugh]

Doc,

What do you think about the Promise 20265R raid chip set (it's on my new MSI K7T266Pro2-RU board?) I have only just started to put the new system together and haven't installed the 2*20GB drives I have.

Phil

[Brian Ellis]

John

The Shuttle sound system has a poor signal-to-noise ratio (albeit not too bad), compared with e.g. SoundBlaster Live or even SB16. Also, the microphone socket is designed only for dynamic mikes, and there aren't many of those around. As I use it for dictation on my office computer, both factors are very important. OTOH, disabling it and plugging in a PCI sound card (I've tried both the Live and a Creative 128) gives zero problems. The built-in one is a C-Media horror.

I've heard that the AB30R, which is a Promise chipset, does work well in both 0 and 1 configurations, but have no first-hand experience, so cannot guarantee how it compares with a Promise card. However, the disabling is by jumper (not software), so there should be no problem as it cuts the power to the Raid chipset.

The Spacewalker web site gives reasonable BIOS support for their cards. I upgraded the BIOS on an AB61 board some weeks ago (I think 5 versions, if I remember correctly) and it went very simply and smoothly.

[Dr Mordrid]

As stated previously I have a general "thing" about embedded controllers of any kind, but for a 2 drive array I would go Promise chipset if pushed.

For more than 2 drives I'd STRONGLY recommend a Promise TX4 board. This is because of it having dual ASIC's (controller chips), which allows each drive to have a master connection.

This maximizes the speed when you have >2 drives. Otherwise the channel sharing of a master/slave layout as on conventional RAID boards causes some bottlenecks that reduce maximum throughput.

Dr. Mordrid