What do you think about cheap pci raid cards?

yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
edited July 2004 in Hardware
I am looking at a few cheap ATA raid cards from eBay. Here are the basic 3 types I found, although there are more than one seller for each type of card. Also, I don't know if there are differences with buying from separate sellers, because even the same card sold in different places has different pictures and electronic layouts and colors and such.

Some day I will use a high bandwidth card with on board memory, but it just isn't worth the price and not worth it for 32bit 33mhz pci.

Also, the stores around me don't have much of anything, and their basic cards similar to the linked ones below cost upwards of $100.

Links:
Silicon
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5108115689&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT
Ultra
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5108269196&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT
Fasttrack
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5107460172&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT

Does anyone have any oppinion or input on any of these or any other?

Comments

  • HackingGuruHackingGuru
    edited July 2004
    There around $10.00 just buy one and see wat happens.
  • yaggayagga Havn't you heard? ... New
    edited July 2004
    Yeah I think I will, but does anyone know ANYTHING about them? Do you think they are cheaper quality than the store ones or are they just so cheap because they are on eBay?
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited July 2004
    I have used the Promise and the Highpoint. A bunch of differant models of each actually. You will almost saturate a 32bit bus with two hot ide drives in raid-0. Save the money on a high end disk controller untill you get a 64bit bus. When you blow off benchmarks and get back to the REAL world there is very little real life performance differance for a desktop user in two properly setup ide drivers versus two in raid-0. Manually dividing the I-O up across seperate drives offers most of the advantages without the risk.

    I tune disk subsytems for a living. Many may still remeber me from the old Icrontic where I was a mod and posted off in this section.....I have very high end scsi raid systems on my dual opterons at my house and for 97 percent of what any NORMAL desktop user does a couple fast scsi drives will seem just as quick non-raided as my big high end raid-0 scsi disk subsystems and I have arguably one of the two or three fastest u320 hardware raid controllers made today. But real world performnce and what a simulated benchmark shows isnt always equal.

    Tex
  • drowddrowd Texas
    edited July 2004
    hey Tex,

    good to see you around. dont be a stranger :D

    and thanks for the advice
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