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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>So right now I’m running a 60gig and a 160 gig drive
in an athlon XP 2600, with two M179’s and a pcHDTV card. Realizing I’m
using very little CPU on this and want to move to a client server setup at home
since I have more than one TV I’ve decided to try moving the
encoders/tuner to a smaller box and use the athlon downstairs by the HDTV.
Anyway, background aside, I’m wondering if the machine I want to put the
cards in can handle it. It’s only a P2-450(dual cpu board, but only one cpu,
can upgrade to two if needed for 14$), but I have an ata/100 pci card for the
drives. My question is can I push that much data through the bus? My current
settings put the M179’s at 2 gigs hour/each, plus up to 7 gigs/hour for
the pchdtv. So a max rate of 11 gigs/hour. My guess is that using DMA on the
drives would allow it to happen exclusively on the PCI bus, so the CPU shouldn’t
limit anything. I’m just wondering if PCI is fast enough. I read
somewhere that PCI runs at half the bus speed. My current bus speed is 266, so
133 on the Athlon machine. The p2 has a 100mhz bus, so 50mhz on the pci there.
I think that’s everything. Does anyone have any thoughts, or math that
might help one way or the other? Thanks in advance,</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'>-Jason</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 face=Arial><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Arial'> </span></font></p>
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