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Add on for raid 0 + ssd

N

note235

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
May 23, 2005
Messages
5,055
I have a gigabyte ud5 x79
with

2 Intel Sata3
4 Marvell sata 3

Currently this is what I plan on upgrading to
Samsung 830 256 on intel
Samsung 830 128 on intel

Raid 0 with 4 drives on the 4 marvell
backups on the rest of the sata2 ports

I'm thinking the marvells will be saturated with 4 raid 0 hdds?
anyone recommend a controller for around $450 max?
 
It should work as you outline, I'm not sure how the Marvell will handle that but it should be able to.

If you are going to raid 4 drives together for storage I would recommend going with Raid 5 instead of 0 (zero). If you raid all 4 of your existing drives together as one RAID 5 Volume you'll be wasting disk space as the Volume would be built using the smallest drive as the marker. So your Volume would be 7,450.58GB or about 7.5TB. Also mixing different speed drives introduces issues.

Raid 0 will give you the utmost speed, but if 1 drive dies you loose all the data.
Raid 5, if one drive dies you will still be operational and can replace the 1 faulty drive.

For your budget I'd recomend the card I am currently using in my own rig.
The LSI 9260-4i
http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=54357

This will allow 4 drives out of the box with the included connector. It'll allow you any RAID configuration you want and it supports SATA 3 (6gb/s).

You can expand up to 128 drives with SAS Expanders.

The on-board raid that 99% of motherboards come with is actually a sort of Software Raid. It doesn't offload the RAID tasks as well as a dedicated card.

Based on your signature and details of your drives, he's what I would consider.

1) Boot to your 128Gig SSD

2) Use your 256Gig SSD as your D: drive for gaming, Video Encoding or anything that you want to be as fast as possible.

3) Set aside the 2 x 2TB Drives, possibly for selling to cover some of the cost of the new RAID card and 3TB Drive.

4) Get a 3rd 3TB drive to match the 2 you already have.

* I hope they are something like Seagate's Baracuda's and not WD's Green drives.

5) Purchase a card similar to the one I linked.
- You'll want to get the optional Battery Backup module or you won't get the full benefits of Write Caching. This will add about $150 so will push your purchase just a bit above the $450 mark you posted.

6) Setup the 3 x 2TB drives in Raid 5 for storage. This will yield 8,381.9GB or 8.3TB

Right now, if I'm reading your config right, you have about 8TB's with no redundancy. So if you have a drive fail on either of your Raid 0 volumes you loose all data on that Volume... Not a great place to be.

I use my Raid array as my Media Server and it works flawlessly using PLEX Media server.

The Raid 5 Setup will be nearly as fast as Raid 0 but provide you redundancy for a single drive failure.

I've been using this raid setup for over a year and couldn't be happier. I'd recommend it to anyone.

There are higher end LSI Cards but for a lot more money but unless your doing a lot of disk intensive stuff, like Databases, Rendering, CAD work or something like that they just aren't worth it.
 
thank you very much for all of that.

I plan on using ST3000DM001 for all my 3tb but ill revise and update in a few then

would getting the kit or bare controller be a better option?"
 
Exact drives I am using now, solid performers.

Good luck with the re-build or re-organizing of storage.
 
Using the RAID0 HDDs on the 4 Intel SATA2 ports is the best solution. HDDs cannot saturate SATA2 links from media. They can maybe from their cache, but if its in the tiny 64MB cache on the disk, it is most probably also in the multiple GB large RAM cache every modern OS has, which is multiple orders of magnitude faster than SATA. So unless you still use Windows XP, SATA2 vs SATA3 is not the most important thing for HDDs. The Intel storage manager provides a better interface and is generally more stable than most cheap add-on solution. It will also not be saturated with 4 HDDs like the PCIe x1 based Marvell solutions. And the ST3000DM001 can deliver around 200 MB/s, so two drives alone can nearly saturate a PCIe x1 port.

If you really want an add-on controller for RAID, for your budget I suggest looking into the IBM ServeRAID M5015 (same controller hardware as the LSI 9260-8i). A controller with its own cache really only makes sense if it has a BBU, which is included in the M5015. For much less you can get the M1015, which just provides 8 ports and provides basic RAID0, 1 and 10 through the host CPU.

EDIT: Since the Marvell 9172 has only 2 SATA channels, obviously there are 2 controllers for the internal ports. Is a RAID spanning 2 controllers even supported?
 
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