ICH9R performance question

[mryerse]

I am planning on adding 3-4 drives to my ICH9r in raid 5. I currently have 2 drives in raid 0. I am not concerned about the performance of the raid 5, but don't want it to slow down my raid 0. Do you think that the IO of having another large array on the controller will slow down my raid 0?

 

[epimetheus]

I'm not sure about an additional array slowing down the controller, but I'd be more concerned with the CPU impact of software RAID5.

 

[mryerse]

cpu? How much as we talking? I have a quad running at 3ghz. I don't think the cpu hit would be unbearable, and the cost of hardware raid is probably not worth the saved cpu.

I am streaming HD to a popcorn hour box and a couple laptops, somewhat constant torrenting, and a HDDVD/BR/DVD rip here and there. This is a temporary solution until I can afford to fill a server case with 16 drives with hardware raid 6.

I keep hearing about WHS but can't get over it's parity cost (1:1). When you factor in the parity cost (and the sata ports which are less than hardware raid but still not free) it doesn't seem much less expensive at all because you need more drives (or more servers) to get the same storage space. I'm hoping that by the time I'm ready to buy that the cost of 2tb drives have come down below $200.