Gigabyte UD4P - RAID question

T

the_b_man

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 5, 2007
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185
The UD4P seems to have:
6x SATA ports off the ICH10R
2x SATA ports off the "Gigabyte SATA" chip off the PCIE bus.
both of which are capable of fakeRAID 0/1.

I will be configuring 2 Intel SSDs in RAID 0, 2 WD 640's in RAID 1, 2 additional HDDs as deep storage, and 1 SATA optical drive.

Question: for best performance, which ports should I be using for each drive? For example, is the Gigabyte controller slower than the ICH10R (ie. best for optical drive; or the rotating drive array), or faster (best for SSDs)? And is it best to have the arrays on separate controllers, or does the ICH10R do fine with multiple arrays?

Set me up :)
Thanks
 
ditch that onboard stuff and go Hardware based. You will be happy in the end. I have had great results with ARECA.
 
The intel chip will also support standalone drives along with the raid(s). I suggest using the Intel chip for the raids because 3 years from now it is more likely a motherboard upgrade will have a backwards compatible version of the Intel controller chip than the Jmicon/Gigabyte chip. Once you make an array on one chip or the other you will almost always (read always but I hedged my bet a little bit) need a version of that same chip to be able to migrate the array. For example if you make an array on the Intel chip and decide to move it to the Gigabyte chip it will not recognize the array and you will have to destroy the array erasing any and all software installed and rebuild it from scratch.

As far as speed, I have seen reviews where they compare them but am too lazy on a Sunday to go looking, I think even on the main site page in the reviews you will find a review that looks at the Intel chip vs. other raid chips for I/0 speed. I seem to recall there was not a huge difference.

The Intel Matrix Storage manager SW that comes along with the Intel Software Raid is another compelling reason I would build any important arrays on the Intel controller. You really should look at its ability to take an array of disks and do stuff like stripe a portrion of the disks for speed and with the same array create a redundant copy of the stripe using raid 5. So if a drive fails you can replace the drive and the raid 5 rebuilds itself and then can be used to rebuild the striped performance partitions. At least I think that what Matrix Raid is all about. Read the documentation I decided just to Raid 5 everthing as nothing I do is all that disk intensive and waiting a second is not an issue. I trash my raid 5 all the time during OCing experiments, it just happily loads windows (somewhat slower if the damaged files are OS critical) rebuilding corrupted files on the fly and then proceeds to check and repair if needed the entire volume in the background. Nice management features etc. etc. I am pretty certain the secondary controller has no windows based management program. Least my older Gigabyte did not come with one.

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/index.htm

I would want to read up on how/if/whatever the "trim" command is supported by either chip or the software and your particular OS. Apparently from what I understand a good "trim" implementation is going to be the key to keeping SSD performance as the drives fill.

Regardless I would load (if needed, depends on OS) both raid drivers during OS install. Its a royal bitch to do it later if not impossible. I will not hurt a thing to have the driver installed but not used. Mainly talking about the Gbite chip.

That all I got.
 
Hi Bill,
Thanks for that very detailed post. I'm not looking to into any fancy footwork RAID, just merely a stripe set across two physical drives and a mirror set across two others, so I'm not sure how useful the Matrix software would be, but I'll look into it just the same.

Excellent point on loading all the drivers during install, I haven't had a RAID set for many years so I'm a bit rusty on that. Seem to remember it involving a floppy disk (gasp) Hopefully it's not too bad 'these days'. If my DVD drive is connected to the GByte controller, and the installer successfully booted DVD, then it follows that the installer (and likely Windows itself) can detect the GByte controller. Ditto with the ICH10R. If all drives (from both controllers) are detected at this stage (fingers crossed anyway) do I really need to install drivers? Should mention OS is Windows 7 RTM.

As for TRIM, from what I understand, RAID controllers typically do not "pass along" the TRIM command, so even if Intel updates the firmware on my SSDs, I could not use it. I'm gambling on the lack of TRIM not hurting performance more than the stripe helps it.

Pug, I definitely did some drooling over the Areca (1210?) I think (the PCI-E one with 4 SATA) but from the charts I was reading, it certainly appeared it gave no performance improvement unless you were striping 4 top-shelf SSDs that would otherwise saturate the ICH10R, or using a more compute-intense RAID algorithm like RAID 5 (which would leverage the card's CPU). For a simple stripe/mirror that won't max the ICH10R, the Areca wouldn't be justified. Performance numbers being almost the same. Also, I'm way over budget already. If I need more ports later (all will be filled when build is finished) then I'll definitely go this way.
 
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