John R Pierce wrote: > >> One drawback is software raid wants a single ide device on each ide >> channel. >> This means buying an ide card (if you want more than two devices) >> which doesn't >> always play well with the rest of the system (4+ ide devices). Some >> mainboards >> might have more than two ide channels, but I just opted for the cheap >> ide card. > > thats easy. SATA. one device per channel. you can get 8 ports or more > of SATA on a PCI-X or PCI-Express x4 card. parallel IDE is dead. > > except, I've never heard of any such limitation, other than the > potential performance bottleneck. One drive going down on a IDE channel can take the whole channel due to the controller being confused or what not. This is why you get RAID (real and fake) boards with 4 or more channels on which to connect a single IDE drive.