kristos

How does this work and how do you prevent it?

There's these bits and pieces of info lingering in my mind but I get a bit mixed up and my memory may not be serving me correctly.
I tried to explain it to my dad because I was thinking of getting a raid controller pci card but I got completely mixed up.

Data corruption can occur when you raise the FSB too high (unless you have agp/pci lock)
(raid) controller pci cards prevent data corruption if they are specified to be 33/66 mhz compatible.

That's what I remeber and I might be wrong about this as I said.

But how does fsb affect your hard drives? I've read something about it being related to the PCI bus but that was only for SATA drives that used the onboard raid controller.

Nways, I'm all mixed up so if someone could be so kind as to explain the whole thing to me

DUR0N

your hd-controller uses the PCI bus. if your PCI bus speed (33mhz) goes up, so does the speed of your controller. When the speed is to high, it wil start to make mistakes, because each 1 or 0 which has to be formed needs some time before it reaches a 'stable' state, then it can be read without problems. If your controller goes to fast, a signal that hasn't reached a stable state could be misinterpreted and corruption occurs.
66mhz raid controllers are designed better then 33mhz ones, so they reach a stable signal state about 2 times faster (more or less, other factors in play)

you can prevent it by:
using a PCI lock (if any)
upping the voltage on the PCI cards (this makes the difference between a 0 (0v) and a 1 (3,3v ?? ) bigger so there is a bigger margin in wich a readable signal is produced
buying a controller which can handle 66mhz or buying a motherboard with a good onboard controller
using a higher devider (also lowers ram and agp speed)

kristos

thanks

jmke

when copying files and/or reading files and you get CRC errors, this can be caused by an overclocked PCI bus

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DUR0N

ow, and offcourse, when you overclocked to far the cpu/ram might generate faults, and most of the time you earned yourself a fresh windows install :/