Should I dump my 3Ware 9500S-8 for ICH10R in RAID 5?

[RHMMMM]

I currently have a 5-drive RAID5 array running with a 3Ware 9500S-8 PCI card on home server. It's currently in an Athlon XP 2600+ system.

I'm planning on upgrading my home server soon to run Server2K8 x64 and was going to go Intel-based (E7200 or E8400 possibly) and was looking at motherboards. I've been out of the hardware loop for some time and didn't realize that the new ICH10R Intel chipset did hardware RAID 5.

Would it make sense for me to dump my aging 9500S-8 card in favor of a motherboard with the ICH10R controller which I can run in RAID 5? I won't be having more than 5 drives in the array because that is the max that my hot-swap bay can handle, so I don't really need the 8 that my current card can handle.


I realize that if I change to another controller that I will have to completely rebuild the array and recopy everything - this is no big deal for me.

Any other pro's/con's that you can think of?

Any advice is appreciated.

[Syntax Error]

Well, ICH10R, while a good RAID controller in itself for RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and 10, is still no match for true hardware RAID in RAID 5 in my opinion. Seems like a downgrade to me, especially since RAID functionality on a lot of these motherboards are afterthoughts that are just slapped on to put another feature on the box to claim about, though ICH10R in my experience has been pretty decent in handling RAID 0, your 3Ware would probably handle RAID 5 with much better performance with a lot less CPU overhead than if you were to do it on ICH10R, and with a lot greater stability and flexibility.

[Volkum]

I've been out of the hardware loop for some time and didn't realize that the new ICH10R Intel chipset did hardware RAID 5.

What? ICHx is fakeraid.

[Ockie]

That 3ware will blow it out of the water.

BTW, what drives are you using, because the ICH10R is having some compatibility issues with certain drives.

[RHMMMM]

I just have some old 300GB Maxtors, forget the model. They're a couple years old at least, but work fine.

I was going to upgrade to some 750GB drives with the deals going on lately but after I spent a few hours cleaning up all my crap, I realized I don't need more space just yet.

[Ockie]

Well, you could always snatch up a new 1.5tb drive and ditch the controller and 300's.. that would pay for the drive and you'd save a lot of space/power/money.

[plutoz]

I'm sort of in the same boat as the OP, at home I have an older Hardware RAID 5 running on an Intel SRCS14L controller. It only has 4 ports and I'm running it in a PCI slot (couldn't justify the expense of a real 'server' board with PCI-X)

I am also thinking of migrating to a new board with ICH10R and upgrading to 5 or 6 drives. Due to being on the PCI-E bus the ICH10R should be able to handle a larger maximum throughput no? Also adding additional spindles should improve performance (and reduce space lost to RAID 5 overhead)

And I would think with today's dual core CPUs the impact on performance of a hybrid RAID 5 would be barely noticeable, especially for a home server.

Actually, one of the servers at my office is running off of a 4 drive ICH7R RAID 5 and nobody ever complains about it being slow, and this is with as many as 10-15 users connected at a time. CPU is a Pentium D 3.4ghz.