Ed Bott's Microsoft Challenge--1/25/01

The KT7-RAID motherboard has an onboard ATA/100 controller courtesy of the HighPoint HPT 370 Dual Channel Ultra DMA/ATA 100 RAID Controller chip with 100MB/sec transfer rate and hot swap capabilities, 'users will have the ability to remove IDE/ATAPIdevices from the system without shutting the system down'... which means that you can take advantage of this hightech, ATA/100 30GB drive, the Deskstar 75GXP is perfect for low cost (relative to SCSI) reliable solutions; and hey if you have ever satright next to a loaded SCSI machine... the noise factor is a consideration that many times is left out these IDE drives are very low noise!?.. For performance use four of these drives in a RAID configuration achieving maximum disk throughput and reliability. For a best practice configuration: put the EdBott SuperServer2001's system, boot and data volumes all on separate disks then mirror the system and boot volumes to the fourth remaining disk, the volumes will live happily together there and always (hopefully) be ready to get you back online.
The KT7-RAID motherboard -http://www.motherboards.com/catalog/product_info.php?category_id=4&index_id=7&subcategory_id=7&products_id=341&PHPSESSID=3a0a12255d935cf5c31d080cd1c0c1a0
HighPoint HPT 370 -http://www.highpoint-tech.com/hpt370.htm
Deskstar 75GXP-http://www.storagereview.com/welcome.pl/http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/DTLA-307045

I'm not going to tell you what brands you
should buy, but this is what I have done.
Knowing that if you put an ATA/100 harddrive
on an ATA/100 controller, you wil never
average close to 100MB/sec transfer rate.
But to almost guarantee 66MB/sec transfer
rate. Put an ATA/66 harddrive on an ATA/100
controller. That way you are getting full
preformance of you hard drive. Buying
ATA/100 harddrive are pricey and you never
get full pr

Ed,

I know you said IDE but are you sure? In my experience no IDE system has ever come close to the low CPU usage of SCSI. Plus SCSI 160MB transfer per second is lightning fast. SCSI used to be a nightmare for cabling and termination but these days it's pretty slick. SCSI drives and equpment may be more expensive but they sure do perform and your machine rarely slows during disk access.

If you must use IDE then a Promise Ultra ATA 100 card would be my recommendation for Windows 2000.

Regards

Richard

Promise Technology Fasttrac 100 RAid 1 at 1000 Mhz supports Windows 2000 and gives the user the ability to hot swap drives IDE interface and supports up to 4 hard drives.
Western digital or IBM hard drives.
40 Gig or larger used.

There are a lot of good disk solutions out there right now. IMHO, there's a winner again in a bang/buck litmus test: the Promise SuperTrak100: a 6-channel RAID 5 ATA 100 controller (that's up to 12 spindles at ATA prices!). He does RAID 0, 1, 3, 5 or JBOD configurations, with the cache holding up to 128MB of RAM, and the 960 RISC processor is really pushing it. It is superior to what you get for the same $$$ in Ultra160 SCSI w/wo RAID. Combine this with the functionality of hot-swap, and you're starting to see what a deal it is.

On to disk, there are many decent ones. You can sleep easily with data on most of them, including Maxtor, Seagate, et. al. If you want the Cadillac (at the price, who wouldn't?), you get have to have the PERC3 and PowerVault 210, by all means, have at it. Don't think it's going to help up your frag ratio or improve print spool enough to warrant the price differential.

I've found the Promise Fasttrak100 paired with four ATA 100 drives faster than my SCSI drives, stable, and secure. You can get 0+1 RAID. After fumbling a hard drive I can tell you that the fault tolerance really works.

What is really trick is to get the Microstar 694D Pro motherboard with the built in Promise controller. With a BIOS upgrade and a tweak to your drive cables as outlined at www.burning-issues.co.uk you not only get all of the capabilities of the FastTrak but also a dual processor board with built in sound. All of that cost just slightly more than the drive controller itself. It makes a great workstation.

There are dozens of controller and HD manufacturers out there, but fortunately there are few that stand above the rest. I don't claim to be an absolute expert on storage, but from what I've read and experienced, this is what I'd choose..

Controller: Promise ATA 100 Raid. Can be found as separate controler, or on many motherboards. The best implimentation I've seen is the K7-Raid (Socket A)

HD: Western Digital.. pick your size. They've taken a beating in recent years compared to the glory days of "If it's not a WD, I don't want it!" but recently they have been putting out some very fast, very reliable drives for good price, and the noise levels are very low for the 7200 RPM drives. If it were my dream machine, I'd pick 4 WD400BB's, configured in a Raid 5 configuration for max throughput and data integrity.

Hi Ed,
This one's a no-brainer. Promise (www.promise.com) offer UltraATA100 IDE RAID Cards. Fast Fast and did I say this before - Fast! Choose between Striping or Mirroring and up to four drives. Obviously using high performance Ultra ATA100 Driveswill give even better performance. We prefer the IBM DeskStar Series for reliability with great drive performance. Better performance than expensive SCSI at less cost - gotta be a trade secret and it is!

I like Adaptec's AAA-UDMA EIDE RAID controller. I throw a 64Mb EDO ECC ram chip on it, load up four Ultra 66 EIDE drives and reap the benefits of speed and data integrity. Of course using Windows 2000 as the OS with NTFS drive partitions. Have sold a couple, using one in house. Works without a problem. Of course this puppy with the extra ram is not cheap but then the good things in life usually aren't. Promise Technologies has a similar unit that I have yet to test. Checking out Promise's FastTRAK100, not as "neat" as their higher end card but has potential. Only problem with the Adaptec is it isn't ATA 100. Yet. Check out the Adaptec card at (long line but thats the link): http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/product/proddetail.html?prodkey=AAA-UDMA&cat=%2fTechnology%2fRAID%2fRAID+for+Entry-Level+Servers

Hi Ed,
This one's a no-brainer. Promise (www.promise.com) offer UltraATA100 IDE RAID Cards. Fast Fast and did I say this before - Fast! Choose between Striping or Mirroring and up to four drives. Obviously using high performance Ultra ATA100 Driveswill give even better performance. We prefer the IBM DeskStar Series for reliability with great drive performance. Better performance than expensive SCSI at less cost - gotta be a trade secret and it is!

Ed, Several people here have pointed to the Promise FastTrak or Ultra as choices, but they have not mentioned the most important reasons for the choice, never mind the "gotcha"s.
The Ultra is the high capacity controller that has been integrated tosome MoBos. The FastTrak is an Ultra with RAID / JBOD capability. The most important thing to think about is that the FastTrak is detected as a SCSI controller under all flavours of Windows. This means that you can have up to 4 drives on the FastTrak, and still have an additional 4 EIDE devices from the MoBo. Additionally, you can run 2 FastTraks in NT (Although you may have to flash the FastTrak BIOS for certain MoBos).
Now for the big "gotcha". FastTraks and Maxtors do not always "play nice" together. That's okay. Use the big IBM DeskStar line, instead. Let's see - thats 4x60Gb (IBM 60 GXP) in a RAID 0+1 for 120Gb on each Promise card x 2 Cards + a separate boot drive for all the Program files, and youu still have 3 IDE channelsleft for DVD (get a writeable version for the heck of it), CD-RW, Tape, whatever...

The fastest controller I've seen is the Adaptec ide raid contoller. Attach 2 drives for raid 0 or three and have raid 5. I recently swapped out a raid 5 hp server that was having problems and put this configuration in it's place and received no complaints from a 30 user architect's location (the files were 2-200mg in size).

I am running a Promise Fasttrack RAID $114.00)card and two IDE Harddrives (20gig $105.00 ea)Raid 0, stipped. Effectively doubles the speed of the IDE drives which have no trouble keeping up with Photoshop. For storage I use cdrw drive and cr's forpermanent, crw's for backup and temporary. Other pieces, 3ea 128MB PC133 memory @$69.00 ea, Athalon Chip and Epox Motherboard. I have a ASUS that is driving me crazy. Impossible to set the IRQs.
Ron Mordini

Promise Raid card. You won't regret the choice. Adaptec's too expensive for an IDE controller, and (surprisingly) does not have nearly the experience that Promise does in building IDE solutions. Go with IBM drives -- other drives are way too costly no matter what their cost (if you get my drift). Go big as you can afford, but use multiple drives and RAID them. Put the drives in removable trays in a big tower. Fill your native mobo IDE drive slots with a DVD player, a CD or DVD writer, oneor two removeable-disk drives (ZIP or Jaz), and/or a PCMCIA port (never mind why, just trust me, you'll use it). Use your ZIP/JAZ drive for all those junk things people probably keep sending you to test. Also point your Internet temp files to the ZIP/JAZ. If you visit nasty places, burn the ZIP/JAZ disk regularly. Use your USB for shared scanners, other peripherals, and wireless networking links. Whooo-e-e-e, build a screamer SAN so cheap that you can afford to give another one to your wife, kids, grandmother, and dog! Enjoy! Now I'm so hot to build something, I'm headed out to get the parts to build one for myself just so's I can see if I can RAID four removables...

Bang for the buck, bulletproof, unflappable, all this is what you should have in a workstation. Here is what I currently have running at my house. My only wish is that I could have the same at the office. The most important things are the motherboard, ram, and proper cooling. Of all the motherboards I've played with, the best I've had up to this point is the Abit VP6. It is a Dual processor Mobo and runs on the latest Via chipset. It will allow you to run your IDE hard drives in RAID 0, 1, or 1+0. I have two IBM 75gxp Deskstars and have had zero problems with them, (the same can't be said for Wester digital, Maxtor, and Quantum) running Raid 0 because I want I'm looking for speed out of my hard drives. Windows 2000 found everythingquite easily and installation was a snap. I was running 2 monitors for a little while, but I'm a gamer and my GeForce 2 Ultra is now running in my box. Get a VP6, a couple IBM HD's, a nice 256 meg stick of Quality namebrand pc 133 cl2 ram, a couple p!!! processors and thank me in the morning. The price on everything is falling at an unbelievable rate and the whole rig wouldn't cost over a thousand if you ran a couple Pentium 866's or 933's. Send me an email if you want some more info.

If you are looking for Storage information, the best place to look for real comparisons is: http://www.storagereview.com They have a database of popular drives of all kinds that you can compare against using different benchmarks etc. A good site for storage info. Personally though, I use 2 Maxtor DiamondPlus 60 ATA/100 2Mb cache drives, on an ASUS CUSL2 MB. Using Win2000 Pro, I have them striped and mirrored. This is only my non-scsi storage solution for my perfect system, if you want moreabout my/your dream machine. Info on the ASUS CUSL2 can be found at: http://www.asus.com/products/motherboard/pentiumpro/cusl2/index.html

Syke

There are also some FireWire harddisk oyt there. Archos has an external one with 20 GB capasity. This one will give you a performance enhancement with its 400 Mbps transfer rate, and you can daisychain up to 63 units on the includet PCI FireWire card.
That should give that extra edge.

Ed
Why ide? with as cheap as drives currently are why not scsi 160? I run numerous quad nt servers all with the adaptec scsi raid 2100 s in my opinion it does not make sence to go with ide drives anymore. You can pick up 36 or 72 gig 10000 rpm scsi drives so cheap now it is worth it.

Which motherboard you use is so dependent on other factors that I wouldn't dream of telling you what to use. However, as far as I am concerned there is only one family of disk drives to use and that is the IBM deskstar range. I use a 15GB as my C: drive a 30 GB drive for my Music and a 60GB for my Video needs. The speed of these drives has to be seen to be believed. RAID of any kind is not necessary in my setup. But if it was I could implement it as I have ABIT KA7-100 MBoard flashed to work RAID 0 and 1 and has the added advantage of being able to handle 8 IDE drives. A MBoard with built in ATA100 support combined with IBM Deskstar drives is probably the best solution available at the momnet in IDE form.

Hi,

I'd recommend the Gigabyte GA-7ZXR MB, which has the promise raidcontroller on board and IBM Deskstar HDs, I've built 3 machines with this configuration 2 as Raid Level 0, 1 with Raid Level 0 and yes, it's fast.... and so far very reliable.

To get the most bang for your buck, I would recommend the ABIT KT7A-Raid Motherboard. This will give you ATA-100 support and RAID support if you want to use it. Tied in with the board leaves you using AMD processors which are dirt cheap right now as well. As far as the best IDE drive out there, it is hands down the IBM 75GXP. To see this drive in comparison to several SCSI drives, check out this article at Tom's Hardware. http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/01q1/010129/index.html

Did I miss something or what? Have you decided on the motherboard yet? If the new motherboard is going to be the one that support ATA100 then that would save on IDE controller card. Go with Maxtor 60+ at 40GB. Been reading plenty of bad reports on the IBM 75GX .Add a 250MB Zip drive for back up if there is no RAID capability for mirroring purposes and finally a Plextor CD-RW for good measure.

Ed:
IMHO, the ATA/66 drives are fast and reliable, including the fact that most modern (ATX or Micro-ATX) form factor system boards have ata/66 built-in. Seagate/Quantum/Maxtor all make quality drives; my PERSONAL preference is Western Digital. The 30GB drives are priced at about $140-$160 from many vendors, probably lower if you search a bit. Be sure to check the drive specs regarding onboard cache,; some drives have as much as 4MB. If you are using an "off the system board" controller, look into the promise brand ATA/100 cards. If you need IDE RAID system, investigate 3Ware controllers. WWW.3WARE.COM.
One final caveat...should this pc be used as any kind of server, or running 24x7x365, don't use IDE. In my experience, while IDE drives are fast, reliable and cost effictive for "average" soho/personal home use, they will not stand up to the punishemnt they get as a server.

Ed,
Something I forgot to mention earlier - When it comes time to prep the boot drive, I would suggest that you set aside a separate partition of about .5 to 1GB and dedicate that to your pagefile/swapfile (I use this technique for all of the Win9x/Nt desktops we run here and at home). I have found that Windows boots up a little faster if there is nothing else on the drive that holds the swap. And it is MUCH more stable when it dynamically resizes that swapfile (as it will, frequently) if there is nothing else there. Oddly enough, using a fixed swapfile size seems to slow things down a bit...hmmm...
Sean

Your looking at a Maxtor or Quantum!! Since Maxtor has now bought out Quantum HDD then Maxtor is the way to go!!
First thing though you should get a Ultra ATA /100 adapter card... Maxtor has one that supports 4 more ide drives
Specs as follows:
Works with most UDMA100/66/33 devices
Up to 100MB/sec data transfer rates
Adds four ATA/100 ports
Onboard BIOS for auto-configuration
Dual independent channel PCI IDE bus master controller
Supports hard drives up to 128GB
Advanced CRC error-correction
Next you want a HD with UDMA/100
This one right here by Maxtor should do the trick:
DiamondMax? Plus 60 Ultra DMA 100
Specs are as follows:
Maximum Capacity of 60.5 GB
Fast ATA/Enhanced IDE compatible
Digital Signal Processor (DSP)-Based Architecture
Ultra ATA/100 Data Transfer Rate
2 MB SDRAM Cache Buffer
< 8.7 ms average seek time
7200 RPM

IDE controllers come as standard on motherboards, so get one that is either UDMA66 or 100, as these are catching up with SCSI speeds. As you only have 2 controllers, each only able to have 2 devices, you are rather limited unless you purchase a seperate controller. The bigger the better, probably about 40+Gb. Western Digital are very good, I use them on all my machines. For fault tolerance you could have 2 drives the same size on one controller and mirror them (assuming you will be using Win2000Pro as your OS - NT4 does this also but is not compatible with new technology - ie USB). Or, if you want more tolerance, you can have one on each controller and duplex them, but bear in mind that if you have a slow CD-Rom on the same controlleras your HD, then your HD will be slowed down.

IDE Controller: Promise FastTrak ATA/100 Raid Card (http://www.promise.com/PressRoom/FT100Advanced/FT100prodlaunch_v3.htm).

Hard Drive: IBM 75GB EIDE Ultra ATA/100 75GXP (http://www.storage.ibm.com/hardsoft/diskdrdl/desk/ds75gxp.htm).

In my experience these products work reliably, efficiently, and extraordinarily. The controller delivers the latest in ATA/100 technology alongside the RAID option for expandability and reliability. The hard drive delivers the best in storage space in a 7200RPM drive. Both are very reliable and are on Microsoft's HCL for every Windows OS. How's that for compatibility?

Short & Sweet:
If 60Mb will do enough for you, there's no reason to spend extra money. Western Digital makes very reliable drives with good data protection relative to the price - about $200...little more little less.

If RAID is a priority, I'd go with the same ATA/100 controller everyone else seems to like. I'd pair it with one of Western Digital's ATA/100 compatible drives...the IBM Deskstar just isn't reliable enough in my book.

I use the 3Ware 6800 IDE controllers combined with IBM 7200rpm drives on my Win2000 servers. They run in RAID5,1,0 & 10...up to 8 MASTER channels , no slaves.. and average about 86mb per second writes. And yes, they will kick ass on most all Ultra2 and some Ultra160 scsi systems. They have awesome support. Check them out at http://www.3ware.com/

Since so many m/bs have a more than adequate controller built in, unless you have already decided to go with a separate controller you really have to include the combination of chipset, processor(s), and controller into the equation. Whether or not the deciding factor is a favorite drive manufacturer or a specific controller model will also determine the available choices. Currently it's fairly obvious that an array of large 7200rpm ATA-100 IDE drives using a ATA-100 RAID controller is the most recommended set up and I agree completely. The 'gotchas' regarding drive compatibility are easily bypassed with a little research, or just reading some of the previous posts.
For instance, for Pentium lovers the Abit VP6 with the dual P-III processors, Highpoint HPT370 RAID-100 controller and latest VIA chipset is a kick-a combo at a fair price. It even accepts the newer ultra cheap 'high density' DIMMs. Just make sure you check out the Highpoint website HPT370 Device Compatibility List and get drives that are verified as compatible with that controller!

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