Server 2003 RAID 5 w/ ATA and SATA

[danman]

I put together a file server with the following:

MB - MSI K8NGM2-NBP
Proc - FX55
RAM - 2GB
SATA HD's - (2) 400GB (1) 320 for OS
ATA HD's - (2) 400GB

Obviously these were leftover parts.

I've set up Windows Server 2003 to RAID 5 the 2 ATA 400GB drives and 2 SATA 400GB drives. Right now it's resyncing the array and looks like it will take 5-6 hours to complete.

Should I have used the nVidia RAID to do this or is Windows RAID just as decent? The ATA drives are both masters on their own channel.

[danman]

So after waiting a day for the array to build I find out it's fuckin slow. I'm back to using a couple of drives as a backup. Is NVRaid any faster or is it still as slow as Windows RAID?

[thebeephaha]

Windows RAID will be slower, but nvraid isn't blazing either as both are software based, not hardware.

[swatbat]

An array that large will take some time. Using software raid doesn't help. Not sure if going with the nvidia raid would be better though.

[sethk]

NVRaid has OK read speeds, but write speeds are horrible with Win2k3 RAID 5, NVRAID5, and Intel's ICHR RAID 5. If you want decent write speeds you generally need XOR accelerated RAID 5 cards (although some add in host based - i.e. non XOR accelerated) cards still have better RAID 5 write speeds than Win2K3 at the expense of CPU usage.

[gjvrieze]

I use Windows Server 2k3 raid 5 on 10 750gb Seagate 7200.10s (2 x ata, 8 x sata) and write speed is not super slow, but also not super fast either, but read speed is super great 50-80% on 1Gb networking.....