Adaptec 2400A, can support 8 drives?

[naro]

Hi guys,

from adaptec's website, i see that it can only support 4 drives, but i would like to check whether the Adaptec 2400A can support up to 4 IDE hard drives using a master and slave configuration.

your inputs are greatly appreciated.

[unhappy_mage]

It has two HPT370 controllers on it, so it could hypothetically work with 8 drives. But since Adaptec would have to support that in their drivers, I'm going to guess it really doesn't work.

[naro]

oh bugger... that's banished my idea of implementing Raid 0 on 8 x CF cards.

anyway, there'll be a bandwidth limit due to the PCI's 133MB/s bandwidth.

[unhappy_mage]

You could try the 3ware 7500-8 (http://cgi.ebay.com/3Ware-7500-8-Escalade-Model-7500-8-8Chan-ATA-IDE-Raid_W0QQitemZ160103692577QQihZ006QQcategoryZ64463QQrdZ1QQss PageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItem) or 7506-8. Relatively cheap, yes? And it's real hardware raid, although for raid 0 it doesn't matter a whole lot.

I think you're likely to be disappointed by CF, though, unless you're just looking for a quiet disk. Transfer rates are nothing to write home about, and access times are in the 1ms range. That's better than disks, granted, but only one order of magnitude ;)

[naro]

that's cheap.. but i've just won the auction for a 2400A on ebay UK...

the fastest CF cards gotta be Sandisk Extreme IV which are pretty expensive right now.. I'm wondering whether the IDE-CF adapters will affect the transfer rates.

[unhappy_mage]

I'd buy one and see how it does by itself. XP should fit on it fine, if nothing else ;) Then you can do some benchmarks on it, at least, and decide whether it's worthwhile to proceed.

[naro]

great!!! do post some benchmarks...

[unhappy_mage]

That is, "If I were you, I'd buy one..." ;) I was suggesting that you try on a small scale before you buy four or eight cards, not that I was going to do the testing for you.