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A8N & RAID

T

Top Nurse

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Nov 4, 2003
Messages
7,346
Greetings most exalted ones...

Got a couple of questions on the RAID that comes with my A8N-SLI board. First of all does the NF4 and SI chipsets connect through the PCIe bus or the PCI bus? I would asume that they are going through the PCIe bus as they are claiming this is a SATA 2 enabled chipset.

Why do people call this software RAID? How does this differ if I go get a card with the same SI chipset on it? ASUS TS says that it is considered to be hardware RAID for both chipsets. Only the SI chipset that can do RAID 5 is what they call software RAID and only when utilizing RAID 5.

My Promise S150 SX4 makes use of an on card XOR engine for RAID 5 calculations so I can see that as being hardware RAID as opposed to the RAID 5 available on the SI chip.

So would I see any significant increase in performance by going to a PCI or PCIe based stand alone card if I am not using a RAID 5 array? BTW, I am using three 74Gb Raptors in my new machine and will pull the two 36Gb Raptors from the old machine once I get the new one operational :)
 
Top Nurse said:
Greetings most exalted ones...
Why do people call this software RAID? How does this differ if I go get a card with the same SI chipset on it? ASUS TS says that it is considered to be hardware RAID for both chipsets. Only the SI chipset that can do RAID 5 is what they call software RAID and only when utilizing RAID 5.
Click to expand...
it's called software raid, since there isn't a hardware solution that does the RAIDing but rather a driver. Hardware solutions matter most to things like RAID-4/5 where calculations need to be done, a hardware solution has a dedicated XOR chip and does not use the CPU. It will also improve the bandwidth efficiency, since data does not need to be read back from the drives and transmitted to the CPU for calculations.
My Promise S150 SX4 makes use of an on card XOR engine for RAID 5 calculations so I can see that as being hardware RAID as opposed to the RAID 5 available on the SI chip.
Click to expand...
true
So would I see any significant increase in performance by going to a PCI or PCIe based stand alone card if I am not using a RAID 5 array? BTW, I am using three 74Gb Raptors in my new machine and will pull the two 36Gb Raptors from the old machine once I get the new one operational :)
Click to expand...
It depends. If you are currently running them on Controller that sits in the Southbridge, then you'd likely see a performance degradation!
 
It depends. If you are currently running them on Controller that sits in the Southbridge, then you'd likely see a performance degradation!
Click to expand...

Are you saying that the NVIDIA controller residing on the Southbridge will run my non-Raid 5 arrays faster than a stand alone card? What about with the onboard Silicon Image SATA chip?
 
Check out http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=872018 for some data on SATA.

In short, RAID-5 is going to suck without a genuine hardware RAID subsystems from the likes of 3Ware, LSI, etc. This is because your host CPU has to make the parity calculations as it lacks a hardware XOR engine such as your SX4 you are currently using. We've already pointed that out many times in many threads - should we sticky a RAID FAQ/myths and realities post? I would be glad to help put together such a project.

NF4 SATA ports are part of the MCP - they're not on any expansion bus. The SI 3114 is, at least on my DFI LanParty NFII, a legacy 32-bit PCI unit, and is therefore capped at 133 MB/sec, and shares that bandwidth with any other legacy PCI devices. You will enjoy the best performance with your drives attached to the NF4's native SATA ports and throughput, as long as you're not using RAID-5, will be as good or better as the Promise unit, and it won't be competing for bandwidth with other PCI devices.

I hate to say this folks, but RAID in desktop systems for performance boost (RAID-0 & 5) is a myth. What little gains you make in raw throughput are cancelled out by increased latency because of the controller having to keep two drives in sync. RAID-1 makes sense to protect you from HD failure. It doesn't protect you from anything else and is not a replacement for backups - check out this post http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1027295195&postcount=4 for my debunking of some more RAID myths.
 
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