It of course depends on the motherboard. Several
manufacturers in the retail market (e.g. Tyan,
Supermicro) do make motherboards with SCSI raid
options in which the raid controller handles the
processing. The IDE based raid options, to the best of
my knowledge, do not handle the processing. I should
add that for the purposes described here specifically
(fast read/writes for photo editing) this should not
be an issue; even if the host cpu gets 'bogged down'
while writing, it is at a time when you most likely
aren't depending on it for something else. It becomes
more important as you demand more simultaneous work
from the computer. In my experience, I rarely do
anything else on my PC when I am editing pictures (ok,
maybe playing a CD).
In my opinion, SCSI's performance advantages on
anything up to a true workstation class computer are
long since gone. Advances in the IDE standard and it's
drives make it far more attractive. SCSI doesn't
become a good option until one is performing multiple
simultaneous read/writes. A single SCSI drive in a PC
doesn't make much sense to me. IDE are larger and
transfer data at the same speed.
Pat
--- Mike Bloor <asia@seratel.ie> wrote:
> Preben,
>
> At 12:34 11/11/01 +0100, you wrote:
>
> >Lastly, these stand alone Raid cards - unlike raid
> solutions on
> >motherbords - have their own processors on board
> which takes over all the
> >hard work, freeing up your system processor.
>
> I knew that RAID in software (e.g. as part of
> Windows NT4) worked on the
> main CPU, but I thought that PC's with additional
> RAID hardware on the
> motherboard (such as many of the Dell servers) off
> loaded these tasks.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Mike Bloor
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