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Albatron P4X845EPro i845E Motherboard Review
Albatron P4X845EPro i845E Motherboard Review - PCSTATS
With the recent release of the 533 MHz based Pentium 4's obviously comes a whole slew of new chipsets to support the new bus speeds as well.
 95% Rating:   
Filed under: Motherboards Published:  Author: 
External Mfg. Website: Albatron Jun 07 2002   C. Sun  
Home > Reviews > Motherboards > Albatron P4X845EPro

The Bad and RAID

Not perfect though...

One of my pet peeves are IDE connectors placement of IDE connectors and the ones from the Promise RAID controller could be in a better location. It'll be hard to use longer or full length PCI cards in PCI slots 3-5 and the IDE cables will probably have to wrap around all the other devices. We also would have liked to see active cooling on the i845E chipset rather then just a large heatsink but it really shouldn't make a difference in a well ventilated case.

A little on RAID...

IDE RAID 0 is not really considered a true RAID since there isn't any data redundancy. RAID 0 takes two drives of the same size/configuration and stripes them, meaning it makes one big drive out of two equal ones. This improves performance by cutting hard drive latency in half. Since the data is divided equally and written on two hard drives it also increases the data bandwidth by two. The reason it's not considered true RAID is because if one drive fails, all data is lost.

IDE RAID 1 on the other hand mirrors two drives of the same size, so in theory if one drive fails, the other will take over as the primary hard drive and the system can continue to operate normally. This is what is supposed to happen with a SCSI hard drive setup and it actually works pretty well there.

The IDE subsystem doesn't allow hard drives to be disconnected while the computer is still powered up and in use like SCSI can unless you have a special HDD tray. Generally, when one IDE drive fails the system usually locks up anyway. The data is safe since it's mirrored on the other drive which is the real benefit.

With IDE RAID 0+1, you need four hard drives of the same configuration/size. What RAID 0+1 does is stripes two sets of two hard drives, one set for a RAID 0 configuration and the other for RAID 1. What this does is offer the best of both worlds, the high performance of RAID 0, with 100% data redundancy of RAID 1. Hence the name RAID 0+1. The only downside would be the need for four identical hard drives.

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Contents of Article: Albatron P4X845EPro
 Pg 1.  Albatron P4X845EPro i845E Motherboard Review
 Pg 2.  — The Bad and RAID
 Pg 3.  BIOS and Overclocking
 Pg 4.  SysMark 2001, 2002
 Pg 5.  e-Testing Labs Benchmarks...
 Pg 6.  SiSoft Sandra and PCMark2002
 Pg 7.  3DMark2001SE and Quake III Arena
 Pg 8.  Conclusion

 
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