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SCSI : Raid or Not to Raid, That is the question.

U

USMC2Hard4U

Supreme [H]ardness
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"To be or not to be, that is the question that plagues our people kirk. We need breathing room!" - General Chang, Star Trek 6

Anyway :cool:

I am unsure what to do. I really want SCSI but dont know if I should go RAID or not. I guess I will be getting the TYAN K8WE Mobo. ANd it has a SCSI Option, but not Raid. How good is an onboard SCSI system as opposed to a 800$ PCIe SCSI Raid Card.?

WIll I see noticeable performance improvments in Raid? Thinking Raid 0 or Raid 5 depending on how much everything will cost. Or should I just go with the onboard?

Thanks
 
What are you going to be doing with this system? Form should serve a function or else it's just a waste of money. :p
 
Even with a hardware acclerated XOR engine, RAID-5 is still a very poor choice for a system boot volume, as data must be read off the disk, have the parity calcs run, then written. Frequent writes will bring a RAID-5 setup to a crawl, even if you are using the latest and greatest 15K SCSI drives. If you need fault tolerance and high performance, you need to use RAID 0+1. RAID-5 is designed to combine fault tolerance and capacity, although it can achieve higher performance under specialized read heavy workloads. Given that you can simply install high capacity ATA drive(s) as needed to serve your high capacity storage requirements, for stuff such as music and movies, forget about RAID-5.

Also, on the desktop, there's a lot to be said for not having your spindles tied together in RAID if you multitask a lot. If you run multiple disk intensive applications, having a spindle service independently each of those tasks will be much better than a single RAID array serving multiple tasks, as you can leverage locality on both disks, rather than having seeks between two different areas on the disks in RAID.

Typically, as UlCompE02, our resident SCSI master pointed out in your first hard drive thread, SCSI HBAs built into server and workstation boards are of high quality. In the case of the K8WE, the SCSI HBA is hooked into one of the PCI-X bridges, so bandwidth is not a problem. It's an LSI 53C1030, I suggest you head to LSI's web site and read up on it, and see if it will meet your needs. There is a second SKU on the K8WE that does not have onboard SCSI, allowing you to save some bucks and install the add-in card you desire.
 
I haven't heard very positive things about the onboard controller, actually. It wouldn't be much of a hit, but I'd personally go for the board with no SCSI and get an addin card. That would also allow for a 0+1 array, or a pair of raid0s.

The k8we is a nice board; 42 lanes of pciE is enough bandwidth to choke a horse. :drool:
 
Don't forget that it also has an AMD 8131 PCI-X tunnel, for some more expansion bandwidth. I will keep your comments on the onboard SCSI HBA in mind though, thanks for the feedback.
 
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