ok, so... the 3GB/sec rating of some new sata raid cards is only the potential of the card and no hard drives have been made that come close to that... so then how do you get max thoughput? I understand the following are factors: > hard drive RPM > hard drive max throughput (which i guess depends on the rpm, so rpm in itself doesn't mean anything) > striping (raid level) i understand those things, but how much do the following affect things? > PCI(?) slot type (33mhz/66mhz/etc) > sata 1 vs sata 2 drives thanks for any help!! I have a pentium 2- 233mhz machine I'm trying to beef up... I'm sick of the pinball freezing everytime windows needs to access the disk. I might decide to go with 15k rpm scsi. jk.

"how do you get max thoughput?" You don't. HDDs are mechanical devices & as such are subject to the physical limitations of it's moving parts. Even that fastest SATA2 HDD can't sustain transfer rates of much more that 150MB/sec. If you want higher rates that, you'd need an array 4 HDDs or more. You're barking up the wrong tree. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews...

"I have a pentium 2- 233mhz ..." If you think adding a hard drive controller card to your old mboard will allow any hard drive that has the capability run at the fastest burst data speeds supported by the card, you're probably not going to get that. I have tried using a recent PCI PATA card in several older mboards including one similar to yours. What I found is the card will support recognizing any size of hard drive because of the bios on the card, but a hard drive connected to the card can run no faster than the mboard chipset will allow it to, despite the card being rated at supporting up to 133mb/sec burst data transfer speeds. E.g. if the mboard chipset supports up to 33mb/sec burst data transfer speeds, the hard drive can run no faster than that despite it being connected to a card rated faster. I suspect the same applies to your old mboard, and it would also apply if you used a PCI SATA controller card as well. I tried the card on mboards with various Intel 430 series chipsets, and Intel 440xx chipsets, and this limitation applies to all of those. It may not apply if you have an Intel 8xx series chipset. Your hard drive does not run at it's max rated speed all the time. 133mb/sec max for PATA cards, and 300mb/sec max for SATA cards, is the max burst data transfer rate - it can only be used for brief periods of time and depends directly on the size of the onboard memory cache on the drive's circuit board - if a hard drive continues to be accessed for the same thing, it reverts to it's sustained data transfer rate which is much slower (e.g. fastest I've seen for recent drives is about 55mb/sec). If you install a more recent drive on an older computer, if the memory cache on the drive's board is larger than on an older drive you used on the same mboard, you will see an improvement in boot up speeds and the speed at which smaller files are loaded overall. OR some more expensive drive controller cards have a memory cache on the card as well and you will see an improvement from that, but it also is used for only brief periods of time. The sustained data transfer rate has increased slowly over the years, but not as much as the maxc burst data transfer rate has. E.g. a drive made in 2000 may have a max sustained rate of 30mb/sec. If you use a RAID card and two or more hard drives connected to it, certain types of RAID arrays treat two or more drives as one drive in Windows - the specs of the drives can't change, but the effective max data transfer rates are faster.

Fasted raid would be a Raid RAM drive. Not sure they exist. You can make ram drives still. We used to use them to speed up applications. On boot you create a ram drive and copy what you need into it. Then you run the application and any other files from the ram disk. Ram disks are virtual hard drives using the system ram. Ram access is many many times faster than any mechanical drive. Many other issues exist with any backplane attached storage. For example your system is limited to the 33mhz backplane speed. You can't exceed that. Your ram however is most likely faster by far. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, are in my top 10

sorry I was joking about the 233 mhz part... and the pinball. I appreciate all the information, though! The reality is that I'm just pondering putting together a new PC that has the fastest and most reliable HD system possible (within reason)... I'm thinking raid 0+1 with 4 x sata-2 10k rpm drives? ... even though 15k scsi would be faster I guess... but they're too expensive, really.

btw thanks for the link, jam... that's great info! oh and by max thoughput... I just meant getting the most possible/available.

SCSI is a waste of money these days unless you have the need to connect more than two SCSI drives to one controller header. SCSI drives often have the same mechanical components as SATA and IDE drives made by the same maker, so the sustained data rate is the same at the same rpm.