Promise ?!

[dizzynoodle]

could someone verify if this is the Promise Card that i should use with a new ATA100 HDD,

http://www.us.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=10253472&loc=101

as there are about 3 models from the company, i am assuming it is this one that i should use as it is a RAID setup !

Thanx for the help, and DOC where have you been lately ?

[Dr Mordrid]

That's the one.

I'd recommend the IBM 75GXP as the primary drive choice with the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40/45/60 as the secondary choice.

The only problem with the Maxtors is that they come with write verification turned on, which slows them down considerablly. This turns off automatically after 10 system powerups or it can be turned off manually with a utility on Maxtors download page.

I also understand the new Quantum's are quite fast, but I haven't had one to test so that's heresay. At any rate Quantum is owned by Maxtor now so....

Dr. Mordrid

[dizzynoodle]

DOC, is the Ultra100 a much slower performer than the FT100 ? I am assuming i can only stripe 2 DiamondMax 60 with the FT100?

[JerryH]

According to that link in your post, you can hook up to 4 IDE devices to your card.

I have a FT33 with two older Maxtor drives, and while they're a bit loud, I've never had a single problem with the setup.

I don't know if it's still possible, but you can convert a $40 Ultra card into a Fasttrak card just by adding a single resistor. There are guides on the net that show how to do this, if you're daring.


[This message has been edited by JerryH (edited 01 February 2001).]

[EchoWars]

The conversion of a Ultra100 controller to a FastTrack100 Raid controller is somewhat more involved than converting the old Ultra66 to a Raid controller. But it worked great for me...bought a Ultra100 Controller for $20 and converted to Raid with a pair of IBM 75GXP's. Rock&Roll! Read up..

http://www.tweakhardware.com

[jeepman]

EchoWars,

I did it the easiest way. I got an Asus A7V KT133 Athlon board, and just added two resistors to the second connector on the Primary Channel ribbon cable as shown on www.tweakhardware.com's page!

I then just used CrazyApe's pre-mod'd BIOS for the A7V and away I went.

I am still bummed though, because even with two Quantum Fireball Plus LM ATA66 drives as a RAID 0 Stripe set, I still drop about 40% of frames doing a 640x480x64K color 30fps capture. The PC-VCR dialog box says I only need about 19MB/sec transfer rate to do that, and I believe my drives should be able to sustain higher than that, but the "proof is in the pudding" I guess.

Maybe Quantum's have write verification turned on as well???

------------------
ASUS A7V, 256MB Infineon PC133, "Copper" Athlon 900@1105MHz, GlobalWin FOP38 with Delta 7000 RPM 38CFM fan. eVGA eGeForce2 MX, 3COM 905C NIC, Adaptec 2940UW Ultra-Wide SCSI, SBLive PCI 1024. Segate Medalist PRO 9.1GB UW SCSI 7200RPM, Seagate Barracuda 4.3GB UW SCSI 7200RPM, Maxtor 20.4GB ATA66 7200RPM 2MB Cache, 8GB tape b/u, Sony IDE Spressa 8x/4x/32x CDROM RW, RAID 0 stripe set on hacked Promise ATA100 with dual Quantum Fireball Plus LM 30GB ATA66 drives.

[Dr Mordrid]

You could try using the HuffYUV codec to losslessly compress those RGB captures before the get written to the drive.

With your CPU it should halve the data rate and reduce your dropped frames. Get it here;

http://www.math.berkeley.edu/~benrg/huffyuv.html

Dr. Mordrid