Fasttrak for the system drive?

[IM_Riktar]

Ok things are going along well with my computer so it's time to try something foolish. But before I do I thought I would ask:

If one had a Fasttrak TX4 would it be faster to put the Operating system drive on the Fasttrak independent of the raid array? Or to ask another way, If I had a TX2 Fasttrak could the same be done, or would I run into problems/slowdowns due to the Video Array having to share the single chip on the TX2.

Or is this all academic since the performance inprovement would be less than noticeable?

Or to put it another way, am I just installing a turbo on my riding lawn mower?

[This_Idiot]

Hi Riktar

I can't see what you hope to achieve - mainly your OS isn't dependent on HD speed. Personally I run a single drive for OS and apps and leave the Raid for hi-speed data.

Of course that's almost history now anyway with the huge increase in DV capture since it isn't specially greedy about HD speed. If you're planning to use an analog card or soft codec with on-the-fly YUY conversion then you'll need it tho.

[IM_Riktar]

Well it was a thought in regards to getting all the hard drives off the motherboard controller so the "rom" drives could have it all to themselves. I was wondering if any improvement in speed would be noticed.

That and the fact that I have my eye on a TX4 for $90 that is becoming hard to pass up on.

But that's me. Thanks for the reply.

[This_Idiot]

Hi Riktar

Well I agree with the price on the TX4. Bear in mind that you will only get the best out of it with matched drives. What I'd be tempted to do is take one of your "older" small drives to use as a boot drive direct from IDE1 off the motherboard (I use an 8Gb here, which was massive a couple of years back) and then add matching drives to the Promise raid as budget allows. I was running a pair of 30Gb deathstars here until a couple of weeks back when I had to strip them out to place on older machines at home that couldn't take larger drives, and have replaced them with a single 40Gb Fuji. I'll hopefully be twinning that one up with a second drive of the same spec in the new year. You won't appreciate any speed gain with your boot drive, and the hit on the Raid drives of sharing apps and/or swapfile will outweigh any gains.

I'd still be interested in hearing your results tho

Chris

[Dr Mordrid]

The TX4 has indeed been working nicely here, but remember two things so you aren't suprised;

1. it takes a bit longer to detect the drives. This is because it uses 2 ASIC's and has 4 headers vs. a FT100/TX2's 1 ASIC and 2 headers.

2. it uses 2 IRQ's, but it shares nicely.

After that it's the one I'd recommend, esp. if you're using 3 or 4 drives in the array.

Dr. Mordrid