Okay… I’m showing my inexperience here. I’m adding additional storage to my Rev. A Power Mac G5. I’ve already filled both stock drive bays—a 160GB Seagate in each—so last week, I picked up a G5 Drive Bracket so I can mount up to three more drives inside the case. My plan is to pick up a couple more SATA hard drives (probably SATA II, but I haven’t gotten that far yet), and RAIDs are certainly not out of the question. Either way, though, I will of course require a controller card.
So here’s my question: since SATA drives are limited to 300 MBps, does it make any sense to spend the extra money on a PCI-X controller? Good ol’ 66-MHz PCI has a peak 64-bit transfer rate of 533 MBps, which seems like it would be more than enough for either of the above; even at 60% of the theoretical maximum, the PCI bus can handle even SATA II speeds with room to spare. But what of real-world performance? Furthermore, would my Mac even utilize the 64-bit transfer rates, or would some factor I’m not considering limit old-school PCI to 32-bit rates, anyway? (I know I’ve got a 64-bit machine, but stranger things have happened.) …and would this all be moot if I built a striped array, since I assume that would boost my drive’s theoretical max to 600 MBps? Ah, so many factors….
On a related note, I’ve got my current 160GB drives in a striped array. For safety’s sake, I’m probably going to get a 320GB drive and mirror this. I assume another SATA I drive would be best for this, since the existing array would limit the entire RAID? …or should I just spend the extra $$ and get an SATA II, which would be a little more future-proof?
The bottom line is that if I’m going to do this, I’d like to do it right.
Please discuss.
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