Topic: PCI/Hard Drive Controllers
started by: eberon
Posted by eberon on Jan. 14 2002,05:48
Here's what I've been thinking about for a while.My machine has a PCI Promise Ultra 100 hard drive controller. This is all well and good, but to my best understanding, the maximum throughput of the PCI bus is 33MB/sec. Wouldn't this more or less provide a bottleneck that would defeat any purpose of a good PCI hard drive controller?
The other question I have to ask is whether I should connect my hard drives through the controller or my onboard IDE channels. I don't notice much of a difference in benchmarks, but I'd like to have some opinions on which would garner me the best performance.
Still, my question about the purpose of an Ultra 100 PCI card stands. Can anyone clear this up?
Posted by DuSTman on Jan. 14 2002,16:45
The PCI bus it 33MHz, and 32 bit (4 byte) wide, which gives a theoretical maximum of 133Megabytes per second.I see your point, this would limit future upgrades to the ATA bus on PCI interfaced controllers, but it's not that much of a problem *just* yet.
Posted by eberon on Jan. 16 2002,05:49
Thank you very much for clearing that up.Interesting.
