Motherboard AK-SR7

10 IDE Channels
10 IDE ATA 133 Channels in Parallel :
  • AK-SR7 has 10 Independent IDE channels, supporting ATA-133 and ATA-100 high transfer rate and capable of supporting arrays of independent disk drives working in parallel.
  • You can use multiple disk drives together in parallel to build a high-performance system to servers.
All Master mode vs. General mainboard Master/Slave mode :
  • Some mainboards have four IDE channels and claim they can connect up to 8 hard drives. That means, it must use both Master and Slave mode. The disadvantage is it will cause read/write bottleneck and degrade I/O performance.
  • AK-SR7 has 10 IDE channels, therefore all hard drives could be connected in Master mode. This will greatly enhance read/write performance.
AK-SR7 all Master mode vs. P4 mainboard with SCSI (Ultra 160):
  • Almost all P4 mainboard has 32bit/33MHz PCI Bus only. Theoretically speaking, the maximum throughput of PCI 32/33 bus is 133MB/s. When you add an Ultra-160 SCSI Controller (the maximum transfer rate is 160MB/s) on the PCI 32/33 bus, it is wasteful. Because the uppermost performance is limited by the lower one, which is 133MB/s at best.