l008com
01-18-2006, 08:16 AM
http://www.firewiremax.com/fire-wire-1394-ilink/duchidefi800.html
So first off, a quick lesson on IDE. On a standard IDE channel, you can hook up two drives, a slave and a master. And both will show up on your desktop and you can copy files to and from both of them at will. But on the hardware level, the IDE controller can only talk to one drive at a time. So in other words, if you have two 500MB files, one on the slave and one on the master, and you copied them to a central location at the same time (assume the central location has a write speed double that of the first two drive's read speeds), it would alternate back and forth, thereby taking just as long to copy both files, as it would if you copied one first, then copied the other when the first finished.
Fast forward to now. I'm trying to build an optical drive tower. I need to be able to read and write from all drives at the same time. If I can only read and write to half of my drives, then theres no point in having the other half.
So on a normal firewire - ide bridge, you can either have just one drive, a master. Or on most of them, you can have two, a slave and a master. But it doesn't matter because I need speed, so to a normal bridge I can only hook up one drive.
Notice I still haven't stated what the purpose of this thread is? The bridge board I linked to above is a dual channel bridge board. So at first glance one would think that it would be the same as having two regular bridge boards. I would be able to read from one drive per channel at a time. Reading from all 4 drives at once would "share" the bandwidth and cut the speed in half. BUT I've been trying to find more info on this bridge board. It says it can do a raid stripe across all 4 drives. The point of a stripe is to have maximum speed, so it doesn't make sense that the card would stripe across 4 drives if it would be two pair of shared bus drives. That would cancel out the whole benefit of the stripe. It also said on some page (not sure if its the one I linked to) that this board uses special non standard IDE ribbons. Which also leads me to believe that maybe this board is different.
So what I'm really hoping is that someone has some specific info on this board, and can tell me if it can read to all 4 drives at the same time, or if its just two regular channels on one board, and so it can only read to two of the drives at a time. At about $100 a pop, if it only does 2 drives, thats $50 per drive. Thats not a very good deal. But if it can do 4 drives, thats only $25 a pop, that is a good deal. Plus its fewer firewire cables to deal with. I've tried searching google for info on this thing but I've had no luck. Hopefully someone here knows a little something about this piece.
Thanks
John
So first off, a quick lesson on IDE. On a standard IDE channel, you can hook up two drives, a slave and a master. And both will show up on your desktop and you can copy files to and from both of them at will. But on the hardware level, the IDE controller can only talk to one drive at a time. So in other words, if you have two 500MB files, one on the slave and one on the master, and you copied them to a central location at the same time (assume the central location has a write speed double that of the first two drive's read speeds), it would alternate back and forth, thereby taking just as long to copy both files, as it would if you copied one first, then copied the other when the first finished.
Fast forward to now. I'm trying to build an optical drive tower. I need to be able to read and write from all drives at the same time. If I can only read and write to half of my drives, then theres no point in having the other half.
So on a normal firewire - ide bridge, you can either have just one drive, a master. Or on most of them, you can have two, a slave and a master. But it doesn't matter because I need speed, so to a normal bridge I can only hook up one drive.
Notice I still haven't stated what the purpose of this thread is? The bridge board I linked to above is a dual channel bridge board. So at first glance one would think that it would be the same as having two regular bridge boards. I would be able to read from one drive per channel at a time. Reading from all 4 drives at once would "share" the bandwidth and cut the speed in half. BUT I've been trying to find more info on this bridge board. It says it can do a raid stripe across all 4 drives. The point of a stripe is to have maximum speed, so it doesn't make sense that the card would stripe across 4 drives if it would be two pair of shared bus drives. That would cancel out the whole benefit of the stripe. It also said on some page (not sure if its the one I linked to) that this board uses special non standard IDE ribbons. Which also leads me to believe that maybe this board is different.
So what I'm really hoping is that someone has some specific info on this board, and can tell me if it can read to all 4 drives at the same time, or if its just two regular channels on one board, and so it can only read to two of the drives at a time. At about $100 a pop, if it only does 2 drives, thats $50 per drive. Thats not a very good deal. But if it can do 4 drives, thats only $25 a pop, that is a good deal. Plus its fewer firewire cables to deal with. I've tried searching google for info on this thing but I've had no luck. Hopefully someone here knows a little something about this piece.
Thanks
John