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 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.