Is the onboard RAID the issue???

[farscapesg1]

So, after my HTPC decided to crap out on me, I've finally gotten around to putting my "expansion project in place" I now have a system acting as a fileserver/sagetv server and my old HTPC case is housing a client system (doesn't do any recording).

I've currently got 3 WD 500 GB RE drives installed in the file server using the onboard RAID5. The motherboard is an ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe with a Athlon X2 3800+ processor.

If I'm watching a show on the client system and decide to copy a file to the RAID array, the video gets very choppy and stutters. Apparently, the fileserver is having issues writing to the RAID array and streaming a video at the same time (even simple MPEG2 standard def recordings).

I knew that there was a cost in extra CPU usage with onboard RAID, but I never figured it would be high enough to bring a media server to it's knees when just copying files Would RAID 1 have the same issues (using the onboard RAID)? I could instead set up the 3 drives with 2 in RAID 1 and use the other drive for stuff that wouldn't matter if it went up in smoke.

My other option would be to buy a PCI-E RAID card, but I'm not sure if that will make enough difference to warrant the cost.

 

[Cyrilix]

Benchmarks?

 

[gigabyte1024]

what's the cpu cost while recording video?
Doing encoding and RAID5 parity might be choking on cpu bandwidth.

 

[unhappy_mage]

What network utilization do you see while doing both things? How's CPU usage look on both ends, and what processes are using most of it? Could the system be swapping?

 

[iroc409]

how does SATA do with multiple IO? IDE can't do more than one thing at a time, it has to shuffle. since really SATA is just an extension of PATA, was there any improvement in IO capability? i would think this could hinder performance.

 

[farscapesg1]

I'll try to do some benchmarks this weekend. I just haven't had any time to do it.

Thanks in advance for any help on this.