Re: Storage

Ok here goes...

Each ATA bus can have a Master Drive and a Slave Drive, but only one of these drives can be accessed at any give time. You cannot write to bothe drive at the same time, nor can you read from both drive at the same time.

The new Macs have two ATA buses, one at 66Mhz and one at 100 MHz. If you stripe the master of the 100Mhz bus with the Master of the 66 Mhz bus you get an ok two drive raid at 66Mhz. If you stripe the Master of either bus with the Slave of the same bus you get a dog slow raid that cannot perform as well as a single drive.

Now to do an internal Raid properly, install an Acard 133 Mhz PCI card. Ignore the 66Mhz bus, use the 100Mhz bus for the startup drive and the dual 133 Mhz buses for your two raids.

If you want alot more storage, install an ATTO UL3D or UL4D card and attach each bus of the dual channel Ulta SCSI card to a 6, 8, 10, or 12 disk IDE Raid array. We have 4 of the eight disk arrays, from CAEN Enginerring, each is built as a RAID 3 for redundancy and then a pair is stripped together (with Atto Express Stripe) as a RAID 0 for speed.

Any questions?

Fred