DDR system

[-lynx-]

Just decided to get myself a new mobo - SOYO Dragon Plus. It's a DDR job so I'm getting a 512MB stick of Crucial PC2100 to go with it. The question is if there are any issues with KT266a mobos I need to know about?

It's replacing KT7a/1GB PC133 - will the performance under XP Pro be affected with halving the memory size?

I also have 45GB IBM deskstar (the one that was supposed to give my all sorts of problems and - touch wood - has been purring like a dream for almost a year now) - is there any point in setting up RAID on a single drive or I'd need to get a secong HD? Do they have to be identical btw?

Thank you for your help

[AKSWulfe]

RAID is for multiple hard drives- so that if one goes down there's still another that is identical.

EDIT: RAID= Random Array of Inexpensive Disks.

Basically, you don't need it unless you want to halve your HDD read/write times and have a duplicate HDD "just in case".
-SW

[sparkzz]

There is a pci latency issue with the 266a chipset, but it has been patched.  Although I dont know if the patch has been incorporated into the 4n1s yet.  

As for the RAID (Random Array of Inexpensive/Independant Disks) you need at least 2 matching disks to setup one.

Mirror 0 - Halves the data stream and reads/writes half to each disk.  Which is supposed to double your read/write performance.  Although in my experience it was really only about a 20% improvement, and a constant source of trouble.  

Mirror 1 - Reads/writes to both disks and creates a backup of your data.  This will cost you performance at the cost of safely storing your backup.

Mirror 0+1 - Does both, but requires 4 matching disks.

Mirror 0 is nice while it works, but if 1 drive gets corrupted (and it will happen) than all data is lost.  Also the new serial ATA is supposed to be incorporated sometime in the second quarter of this year, and the proposed read/write times of the serial standard are close to SCSI numbers.  The current onboard Raid setups won't be comparable to the new serial ATA (if its even close to what its supposed to be) and in my opinion its worth the wait rather than investing in matching disks.  

BTW- its recommended to buy disks from same production batch.  Some people have had trouble with matching model drives using different cache memory on the drives.  So you really almost have to buy both drives at the same time.  

Sparkzz

[Grayarea]

I work with very big database servers on Oracle, so I know quite a bit abour RAID.

RAID 1 mirroring, no practicle use to gamers. How often have you had a disk crash these days? However if the controller is programmed right the reads can be spilt between disks, thus improving read performance. Write performance should be unchanged (compared to a single disk) in any well written system.

RAID 0 Striping, Allows you to use two (or more) disks as one big one. Most conrollers allow dissimilar disks to be used, this is however wastefull, and I would recommend using two disks bought at the same time, of the same type.

Performance in striping is fast. On dual IBM deskstar 38Gb disks I get 24Mb per second sustained read, and about 15-20Mb second sustained write.

For sequential reading and writing RAID 0 gives you the best performance. With SCSI the number of disks that can be striped is only limited by the bandwidth to the BUS. So the more disks the better.

However if you lose one disk, the logical becomes unavailable too. So backups are a very good thing. Someone said that disk corruption is an issue, I have never seen disk corruption cause a stripe set to go down. This is not to say it cannot happen though

RAID 5 Striping with parity, Good read performance, not so good write, however it gives more disk space than miroring with the benefit of a single disk failing will not bring down the logical drive.

RAID 10 Striping with mirrors. The most available RAID type, fast with read and write, the only choise for databases.

The bottom line, will RAID make AH run faster on your machine, no but it will boot like the devil is after it

Grayarea.

[minus]

any 1 know where to get the PCi latency patch

[Defiance]

Hiya's,
Lynx don't get a single 512 stick of crucial get 2x256

Have Fun

Def

ps: here ya go minus http://www.networking.tzo.com/net/software/

[Doberman]

Originally posted by Defiance
Hiya's,
Lynx don't get a single 512 stick of crucial get 2x256

Have Fun

Def
 

  Too often people throw out advice with abosultely no explination behind their reasoning, leaving you to wonder why it would possibly matter and whether the poster knows what the hell he's talking about or if he's just a crackpot.  Such is the case here.

FWIW this is good advice, assuming that you're not gonna be upping the memory agains soon and hitting your physical slot limits.

If your system is accessing memory past the 256 Meg mark, you'll get better performance from 2 256MB sticks instead of 1 512 since it can perform processes on both sticks at once, instead of having to wait it's turn on the single stick.

Those who wish to give advice would do well to explain their comments a bit if they want their words to be given more than a passing thought.

D

[-lynx-]

Uh-oh - I have already got 1 512MB stick. I figured that since there are only 3 slots on board I'd better get bigger sticks. Do I have to get another 512MB now?

[Defiance]

"Too often people throw out advice with abosultely no explination behind their reasoning, leaving you to wonder why it would possibly matter and whether the poster knows what the hell he's talking about or if he's just a crackpot. Such is the case here".

ROFLMFAO



Have Fun

Def

OOPS: Lynx search here it's a great place for help on issues
http://www.amdmb.com/vb/index.php

[mrsid2]

Grayarea: When I tried Raid-0 for the first time, I had a 2-week old samsung 30Gb HD die on me a couple days after I striped.

I sold my old computer, transferred all stuff to the new stripe - nothing important backed up. Cost me a helluva lot of software, including 100+ scanned photos from our holidays.. :/

I guess I should buy some media to backup the 80Gb of stuff I have stored atm before striping again

[bloom25]

I see a few things here that I just feel like commenting on:

RAID = "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks" - Anything "random" in a computer is not generally a good thing.

2 x 256 MB sticks are faster than 1 x 512 MB stick of ram when enabling "bank interleaving".  Although bank interleaving does increase performance some, I'd rather have the extra empty slot available for future upgrades.  Another consideration is that almost all motherboards lose some performance when populating all available slots with ram by having to switch to slower settings for some timing parameters.  

(Just so someone doesn't accuse me of spouting advise without a reason, it's because SDRAM sticks have a high impedance connection, and the resulting impedance mismatch with the source results in signal reflections.  To prevent errors and the resulting stability problems that would result, the system switches to more conservative memory timing settings.  Radio and microwave circuit people would know exactly what I'm getting at here... )

I'm not aware of any "PCI latency" issues reported with the 8233 southbridge that cause data corruption (the one used in most KT266a based boards).  The VIA southbridge with the infamous "PCI latency" issue was the 686B southbridge, which could cause data corruption under certain circumstances.   Regardless, this type of problem is pretty simple to patch once the problem is narrowed down.  I know the 686b patch was later just built into future VIA drivers.

PCI latency is such a general term, but it's important to note that due to the bandwidth limits imposed by the PCI bus it is valid to say that all recent chipsets are going to have either data corruption issues or suffer from a performance hit by imposing a limit on data transfers across the PCI bus to prevent any issues from occuring.  (This is the case with the 80-90 MB/sec wall Intel imposed on the i845 chipset.)  Serial ATA is (hopefully) going to fix this before it becomes a huge bottleneck.