ABIT KT7-RAID: the best of his class
The good thing and the bad of the KT7
The first thing that attracts us of this badge there is the distribution of the components, correct and clean... almost perfect. 8 grooves can be occupied by cards as long as love without finding obstacles... but nevertheless the AGP is too much close to the memory grooves, and collides a little with his clamps.
Solution? To install the memory with the disconnected videocard. It is not anything that comes to the category of "problem", but it is a sorrow not to be able to give him 10 in design... 9,5 say.
Very well, there are more categories in which to obtain 10, and the KT7 obtains it in that of overclocking and BIOS. Of course, there are configuration badges without jumpers, but also SoftMenu III allows to fit EVERYTHING adaptable and more: voltage of the mike (in increases of 0,025 V), voltage I/O (of the motherboard), mysterious options for the mike and the memory... it is possible to fit quite automatically, but if it belongs to those who prefer to do everything to hand, a good moment will happen.
ABIT has strained for improving the stability of these badges, for which it has improved his electrical design thinking about the mikes near to the GHz (with 6 transistors that... good, the details, in the ABIT web site) and also it has included the nice fan for the chipset. They deserve a positive note for this effort.
And speaking about the chipset, a curiosity: probably in the image it is not appreciated well because the fan is "horizontal", but the case is that the Northbridge has been turned 45th, to shorten the length of the circuits, what also should favor the stability.
The RAID
What?, they will wonder many. Well, first of all let's bear in mind that this characteristic only is present in the model with checker IDE Highpoint HPT370 (the KT7-RAID), and that the use of the ways RAID is optional, that nobody believes that it is not going to be able to use the discs of a habitual way. 
The checker is of the type ATA/100, being able to work of course in other ways theoretically slower like ATA/66, ATA/33, IT CHIRPED... ah, to these effects, "ATA/xx" is equivalent to "UltraDMA/xx", if someone did not understand anything of on what we were commenting.
With this checker Highpoint HPT370, the maximum number of devices IDE (hard disks, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs...) rises up to eight, what is already very interesting in terms of enlargement of the team or professional uses. But also, the chip provides support RAID, what gives us completely novel diverse additional options on the market to which this badge is destined.
And what is RAID? So, grosso way, is a system that allows to use several hard disks of special form, to increase the safety of the information and/or the yield of the computer.
The novel thing of the KT7-RAID is that normally the systems RAID are designed for SCSI, with the highest cost, while the RAID for systems IDE is slightly very recent (but not invented by ABIT, eye, companies as Promise had already realized it previously). There exist several ways RAID, of which the KT7-RAID supports the following ones:
- RAID 0 (striping): he needs at least 2 hard disks, which it uses as if they were the only one, increasing the yield.
- RAID 1 (mirroring): he needs at least 2 hard disks; it realizes automatically "you copy mirror" of the content of one in other, so that the safety of the information increases very much.
- RAID 0 + 1 (or "RAID 10", striping and mirroring): he needs at least 4 hard disks; it combines both characteristics, speed and safety of the information.
RAID 1 would represent an advantage for many users... although few ones are conscious of it. In the labor world, the loss of critical information can turn out to be so fatal as to suppose the loss of an employment or the failure of a prosperous company, and unfortunately at the time of realizing safety copies usually the discipline of the users leaves much that to wish (if he feels aforesaid on having heard this, perhaps he was interested in to read this article). To install another hard disk to realize automatically safety copies of ALL his information is an intelligent investment and even economic.
RAID 0 is a way slightly difficult to evaluate; on the one hand, the disc yield increases perceptibly, since it is read of both discs simultaneously. But on the other hand, the information is divided on the discs at block level, and that implies that a serious mistake in one of the discs can involve the loss of all the information.
We speak about serious, generally physical mistakes, which many users have never experienced but which happen every day; if you decide on this way, do safety copies in other means (CD-ROMs, magnetic tapes, ZIPs, diskettes...) or it is possible that he needs to resort to a company of "rescue of hard disks", which tariffs are more than respectable.
Obviously, the most interesting way turns out to be the RAID 0 + 1, since the information is divided but except catastrophe or immense bad luck we will have another hard disk "mirror" with the same information. Nevertheless, the high number of necessary disk drives puts it to a prohibitive cost for most of users, who will have to choose between safety or speed.
|
Pulsate in the picture desplegable or in "Following" |
|