u320 on a u160 card

[pRS317]

will there be a significant performance hit with using 2 15k u320 drives on a u160 controller running on a standard pci bus as opposed to using them on a u320 card on pcie if both cards have 128mb battery backed ram?

[DougLite]

Not likely. Your drives are going to push 80MB/second, even if they're the latest and greatest, under the absolute best of conditions. Actual application level throughput will be lower than that.

I wouldn't worry too much about interface speed, especially if you are cost concious.

[Ice Czar]

besides your maximum throughput is 133MB/s with a 32bit 33MHz PCI bus
youd want the drives for their lower latency and higher sustained throughput (which comes from the spindle speed)

it would take a multiuser environment with a decent IO que and a 64 bit 66\100\133MHz bus or PCI-E to start to employ the interface throughput of U320 and its just damn unlikley youd normally have an IO que that needs that

caveates to that would be HDDV or other real time video editing, then a single user could generate an IO que deep enough to benefit

worth a read > http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=699246