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DevX81

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 16, 2000
Messages
1,283
After researching for the past few days, this is what I have come up with that I will be building (pending your input and my financial status):

AMD 64 X2 4400+
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
WD Raptor 73GB x3 (RAID 5)
Antec NeoHE 550w

Memory:
2gb (4x512) or 1gb (2x512) of one of the following:
ocz pc4800
patriot pc4800
crucial pc4000 ballistix tracer

Case/Optical: drive yet to be determined.
Video card: some flavor of 7800 GT. (*Maybe* GTX if i can afford it)

I do plan to watercool, and OC, but not OC to the very limit. Stability + Speed.

Two questions I put before you.

#1: Any Happy/Horror stories regarding this motherboard and any of the 3 manufactureres listed above?

#2. Ive read on newegg and ASUS's site that the sillicon SATA Raid controller can do raid 5. Can anyone confirm/deny this? If you have used it, does it work well or is it worth it to drop $200 on an add-in card (promise/highpoint)?


Thanks!
 
I really wouldn't spend the money on 3 raptors for a raid 5

use one for a boot and with that extra 300+ you'd save by not getting two more, buy a nice storage drive or two. You will be much happier that way. OR, put that money towards the video card you want.
 
I am after complete speed and fault tolerance in the case of the hard drives. I want raid 0's performance (HD's are still the slowest piece of the puzzle in any computer), but raid 5 affords me some protection should one drive dump on me. I feel that 5 gives close to raid0 speed with some degree of protection. (I, like many others, do not know what the term 'backup' means.)

I debated 2x 36gb raptors for a raid0 OS/App drive and data on a single 160+gb storage drive. I do not need a TON of space however, 3x 36's would be fine (72gb total cap.), but double the space for an extra $50 per drive ($170 vs 120 or so) seemed worth it.
 
I seem to remember reading some reviews a while back, on either [H]OCP or Anandtech.com that said that the Raid 0 performance is merely theoretical, no noticable real world gains where achived, and i remember tests to back it up. I will look for the review, but wasting time on Raid seems to be just that, a waste. (the limited real world performance probably indicates a bottleneck elsewhere in the system, between the hdds and the CPU)
 
Have you thought about going with a larger number, of larger drives, that are slightly slower performing? You could easy put 4x250 gig maxtor maxline 3's on there for about $400 dollars and perform the same if not faster than the raptors would in raid 5 and have a very nice 750gig available space wise. You could even do raid 0+1 or 10 and get raid 0 performance with raid 1 fault tolerances and still have 500 gig available.

I just hate to see people spend $500 on raptors. I had two in my system in a raid 0 and eventually just sold one off because the performance gain wasn't there. Raid5 like raid 0 will really only help you on single, large contiguous files transfers for speed, not for daily usages. Raid 5 with 3 drives will basically give you the same read rates as a Raid 0 with 2 drives. Writes will kill you though, especially if you're using an onboard raid controller because that will offload most it's work to the CPU and parity writes are very, very intensive. You may see performance even less than a single drive for write speed using an onboard controller.
 
I used to run two 36GB Raptors in RAID 0 and now only have a single Raptor and the second in another PC. I just didn't notice a difference in speed to be honest. Load times were the same and thought it was kind of a waste to have both. Storage wasn't a factor as I have a dedicated PC to store all my data so I'm very happy with just the one Raptor.

I'd recommend just getting the one 74GB Raptor and a 300GB drive for storage.
 
Hm.. perhaps I will review some raid numbers others have posted. If it is truely not worth it, 1x 73gb raptor will suffice, as I do not need a large amount of storage. Or maybe 1x36g raptor and 1x 160gb sata150 drive.
 
Double on what enforcer said... smartest thing to do. I also believe outpost.com has a very sale on 200gb if you dont need 300.
 
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