[Sodium]

Hello all. I am in the process of buying four SCSI hard drives. They are Seagate Cheetah, 15,000 rpm 18gb drives to be more exact (Model ST318451FC). I am writing because I would like to set up a RAID array with these SCSI drives, but I have no experience working with SCSI before and I am not sure how to go about this. As far as I can tell, I will need a SCSI RAID PCI controller/adapter (running Windows XP here), cabling to run between drives (the drives just plug into eachother, forming a "chain," correct?), and two terminators at each end of the chain to prevent the signal from bouncing off of the end and resonating back, causing interference.

The problem is, I am having trouble finding a good SCSI RAID PCI controller card. I am confused when I read some of the product descriptions. They claim they can support a certain number of drives (15 for example) but they have only one "channel." For RAID, do I need one channel for each drive? I keep seeing these cards with multiple channels and I don't understand what they are for, or if I could run a RAID array off of an adapter with only a single channel. Please explain!

I have been looking at a card... please tell me if this would fit my idea? Adaptec 2100S.

Also, another question : I see that the card I am looking at claims 160mb/sec maximum transfer rate, although the hard drives seem to be capable of much more. Will this mean I am completely limited to 160mb/sec no matter how many hard drives I have on the same adapter? Will multiple channels create greater throughput? Is this limit imposed because the card is run through PCI?

Thanks for reading and I would appreciate any comments that you may have. :up:

 

[crjdriver]

Here is an Adaptec card from newegg that is less than 1/2 the price. To set it up put your drives on the card with the terminator plug in the last drive. Enter the raid [not mb] bios and create your array. Since you have 4 disks, I am assuming you are going to setup raid 0/1 stripe and mirror. You will do the partitioning and formatting from your xp or win2k cd. You will need to load the scsi driver during the first part of setup so have the driver on a floppy.

 

[crjdriver]

If you have not bought the drives yet, I would look into sata raid. You can buy an 8 drive card for $164 and the sata drives are pretty cheap now. Just about as fast and about 1/4 of the price.

 

[ck2000r]

I would agree crjdriver the SATA raid would be cheaper and a Western digital raptor 10,000 rpm drive in raid would be cheaper and still really fast, not as fast as SCSI in raid but is the extra money worth it?