>ooh, I'd not heard of those. Are they better than the 3ware kit then?

Dunno. But for just two channels (4 drives, all of which can be in use simultaneously), the PacDigi board is awesome, and can saturate the PCI bus with just the two channels moving data around rapidly.

The nice thing about it is that it is NOT raid-specific --> very useable as just a desktop interface for everyday stuff. It really offloads all of the ATA register twiddling from the host (a typical ATA transfer requires 8->12 writes to the ATA registers, at 120-667ns per access, depending on the PCI bridge. That's a lot of CPU cycles to spend just sitting around writing registers.

The PacDigi offloads all that from the CPU, and does neato things like tagged queuing (to IBM/Seagate drives, nobody else seems to have it yet) in hardware, and handles auto-polling to keep both drives per-channel active at the same time.

Cheers