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Internal vs External Raid0 and 5 cards

Cyber Akuma

Cyber Akuma

Gawd
Joined
Jan 3, 2009
Messages
663
Never setup a RAID system before, and what I want to do is a little on the unorthadox side. I am planning to setup the OS drive as RAID0 with SSDs and the storage to be RAID5 HDDs. The RAID5 isn't really going to be a problem, but I have a lot of questions about the RAID0.

First of all, the whole point of the RAID0 is read/write performance above all else, and the RAID5 for redundancy and fault tolerance. Would I then be better off getting a seperate card for the RAID0 array rather than use the motherboard's built-in RAID0? And if so, I would like to avoid if possible having two seperate RAID cards, are there any good cards that can handle both a seperate RAID0 and RAID5 array at the same time? And if so, would the performance of the RAID0 suffer?

I also know that Intel only a few months ago released an update to support TRIM over RAID0 on some of their motherboards, do any of the 3rd party RAID cards suppot TRIM over RAID0 yet? And is TRIM only used to increase the efficency and lifespan of the SSD, or does it improve performance as well?

Come to think of it, what are even some good brands of RAID cards that don't cost something ridiculous? All I get when searching Newegg are brands that I know are total junk like Rosewill or SYBA.

(P.S. Would I need PCI-E for the 0 or 5? Or would plain PCI be fast enough?)
 
Out of curiosity, why RAID0 multiple SSDs for the OS drive? Why not a single larger SSD?

Most RAID controllers can handle multiple RAID arrays of different types at the same time without a problem--even on-board controllers will do this. Sometimes issues arise from trying to use multiple controllers at the same time for boot drives (seems to be a hit-and-miss issue--dependent on the motherboard and card). If you use a single good controller card (I'd suggest PCI-E), you shouldn't have a problem.

What's your price range for a card? You can usually get away with a cheap card for a simple RAID setup, but when you begin to do more-advanced/taxing RAID setups, you should invest in a better controller (i.e., instead of tens of dollars, look closer at $150+ ones).
 
teh_chem said:
Out of curiosity, why RAID0 multiple SSDs for the OS drive? Why not a single larger SSD?
Click to expand...

Two reasons

1: To nearly double the read/write speed, since I plan to have my games on it I am hoping this will cut their loadtimes, as well as the OS loadtime.

2: Space, 500GB is the absolute minimum I can get away with in terms of all the software I will likely be loading on it, and it would cost as much if not be cheaper to use two 256GB drives in RAID0 than a single 512GB, but two SSDs in RAID0 will far outperform a single SSD on it's own.

teh_chem said:
Most RAID controllers can handle multiple RAID arrays of different types at the same time without a problem--even on-board controllers will do this. Sometimes issues arise from trying to use multiple controllers at the same time for boot drives (seems to be a hit-and-miss issue--dependent on the motherboard and card). If you use a single good controller card (I'd suggest PCI-E), you shouldn't have a problem.

What's your price range for a card? You can usually get away with a cheap card for a simple RAID setup, but when you begin to do more-advanced/taxing RAID setups, you should invest in a better controller (i.e., instead of tens of dollars, look closer at $150+ ones).
Click to expand...

I heard that those on-board RAID controllers are nowhere near as good as a dedicated card, especially for performance on RAID 0 (and very very few can do RAID 5).

Well, $150-200 is a bit pricey for me but I guess I can make that my ceiling, especially if the card can do TRIM over RAID0. $300 if the card and handle both a separate RAID0 and 5 array at once without the RAID5 impacting the performance of the RAID0. Wouldn't a cheap card not give me anywhere near as good performance on the RAID0?

Most of the cards I saw were either junk cards in the $20-50 range.... or $500-800 high quality cards, I saw nothing in-between... on Newegg at least. I don't even know what the good brands other than obvious ones like Intel are. $500+ is WAY out of my pricerange.
 
To nearly double the read/write speed
Click to expand...

This is true in benchmarks and in large sequential reads and writes however most applications do not read or write GBs at a time which makes the real world performance gain to only a few percentage points.
 
What is your backup plan? I ask because you're going to lose all of your data several times while you figure out RAID.
 
I was talking to a few people and was told that no RAID cards support TRIM over 0, only the internal RAIDs on Intel 7 series motherboards, and that there would be very little performance difference between motherboard RAID 0 on SSD and a RAID card for RAID0 on SSD. So I guess I will have to look for a mobo with the 7-series chipset and use the card just for RAID5.
 
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