Multiple Drives?

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KillerButler

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 2, 2003
Messages
282
I was wondering if there was any performance problems with running more than 2 drives? I have a few drives I want to put in my system for storage. If I run 2 drives on my Primary channel on motherboard and then run 4 drives on a Controller card, Will I take a performance hit on the system?

I can't afford to make another system as a server. So all the drives will go in this system.

System Specs are as included:

P4 2.8e Prescott
1 Gig No Name Ram
Evga 6800NU
Audigy 2 Value
480 Watt Enermax PS
Lite-On 16X DVD Burner
Lite-On 4 in 1 Drive
1X 36 Gig Raptor(OS, Apps)
1X 120 Seagate SATA(Games, Programs)

What I want to add:
Maxtor ATA133 Controller
1X 20 Gig Maxtor (Family Pictures)
1X 20 Gig Maxtor (Wifes Personal Drive)
1X 80 Gig Maxtor (MP3's)
1X 120 Gig Maxtor (Movies)

I am just wondering if I add these drives will I have a problem with gaming performance?

Thanks In Advance
 
nope the PCI bus is far faster than the internal performance of the drives and any reasonable load a single persin can put on it

in a multiuser environment you might want to jump to a 64 bit 66\100\133MHz PCI bus (PCI-X) or PCI-E but its very unlikely your taxing the 32 bit 33MHz bus you have

the IDE Bus (or SATA) are sub buses to the main PCI bus
devuces flag down the CPU with interupt requests (IRQs) when they need attention

IDE is sequential however
cut & paste 101
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


Optimizing Physical Configuration
being on the same channel there are a few considerations

IDE\ATA\ATAPI is sequential
meaning first the HDD reads a part of the file until the HDD's Cache is full then writes it to the Second HDD,
then that repeats each taking its own turn
then its unlikely its reading the file from a single location, its probably fragmented, and when it writing it, its also writing it to multiple locations, that introduces the latency and access times of both drives into it

if your going to be transfering alot of data inbetween two HDDs on a regular basis, its best if they are on their own channels, writing from a HDD to a Optical drive is alot better, the optical can only deal with a maximum of 33MB/s Burst (UDMA mode2) whereas the HDD is probably at UDMA mode5 100MB/s burst (50>30MB/s Sustained), in short the sequential issues arent enought to effect the burn speed with modern software (and reads arent really an issue either) both cant saturate the bus

of course those are just interface speeds and are not the sole consideration of HDD performance > As the Disc Spins @ Lost Circuits

there is a myth about putting optical drives on the same channel as HDDs, it is just that a myth, but it keeps getting reinforced by the way Windows deals with ATA\ATAPI issues
basically with Independent Device Timing two devices (master\slave) both transfer their data at their own highest speed, but, they both either have to be PIO (which is glacially slow) or UDMA, if one defaults to PIO because of some issue, Windows will default the other as well. There was a time when CDROMs where only PIO, and HDDs where DMA, for that period of history you didnt want to share a channel, but modern opticals are UDMA mode2 so there is rarely any issue

some of the reasons a device might default to PIO
DMA Mode for ATA/ATAPI Devices in Windows XP
IDE ATA and ATAPI Disks Use PIO Mode After Multiple Time-Out or CRC Errors Occur

however if possible it is ideal
(for data integrity if nothing else)
to have each device as a master on its own channel

whenever possible consider from what source to what target the large files are being transfer on a regular basis,
and try to adapt your physical configuration to accommodate that ;)

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I run a 6 channel RAID5 array myself
the add on controller isnt going to hurt perfomance
you might want to switch off indexing those drives though
you might even consider creating a parity array if there wasnt such a massive difference in their sizes
 
Awesome, Thanks for the links and explainations. No major data transfers will be going on. In the future, I will be making a server. But for now this will have to do. Again thanks for the explainations.
 
Wonderful and thorough explanation. The only thing I could add is if his PSU will handle the extra load.
 
Indeed and we have a whole forum of PSU geeks to help with that too ;)

with that many drives figuring a spinup draw is a good idea
roughly 2A per drive discounting all but one of the opticals as a worse case
and since all the fans are also on the +12V those as well and say 25% > 50% draw for the CPU & GPU
then you derate the powersupply for the given operating temperature and workup a worse case runtime draw

after everything has spin up it will drop to about 0.5A per drive to keep them spinning and the odd seek, normally you can get really accurate power draws for drives if you dig deep enough, unlike say vidcards :p

see > http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=844691

if the controller supports delayed spinup for IDE drives that would help alot ;)
an almost universal feature in SCSI
 
The controller is just a cheap ATA133 controller that came with the 120Gig Drive. It is By maxtor. Is there a better controller I should look into? This is all greek to me. I am not really into raid since my drives are all different. I would love to have all my drives on there separate channels and is there a controller that would do that with 6 drives and the optical drives as well.
 
well yes but they are also typically RAID controllers and in addition are rather expensive
the setting on such a card would be JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks)
which sometimes means spanning the disks into one big volume and sometimes mean individual disks on individual channels


multiple cheap controllers with 2 channels allowing 4 drives a peice would likely be the better & cheaper choice, provided there are PCI slots available. They run $20 or so
Promise TX2 comes to mind

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102002
$25
 
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