Motherboard Raid Help

[board2death986]

Please don't laugh me into submission but i've never had the need for any type of protected storage solution (i know raid isn't a sure bet to data protection), but my storage has acrued to the point where I want to gander at putting together a Raid 5 array. My budget for this is relatively small, and my question is this:

I've noticed motherboard Sata ports include Raid options 0/1/5/10/what have you, does this include all SATA ports on the board or only specific ones? I know where it matters it's worth buying a dedicated card but for the size of the array I would need around 8 TB drives and those cards are a bit out of my range. If my idea is sound, I could use a motherboard with 8 SATA ports http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128358 and use the onboard solution to create an array.

Laugh, ridicule, but please also advise if this is possible. I dont have the cash to invest in a high end RAID controller, and while my data isn't priceless i'd like to try to put some kind of protective solution in place. I've looked at simpler solutions like Drobo but for enough ports the S version is close to $800, so a Raid card with some extra drives would still be cheaper. Help please!

 

[strikerP4]

I'm no expert either but I have been working on a RAID project of my own.

A couple of things with the mobo you have there. Only 6 of the ports can be used with RAID 5. The other two ports are on a different storage controller than the Intel southbridge.

You could try six 1.5Tb or five 2TB drives. You would probably get a little under 7TB usable. Keep in mind you would have to split into into at least two volumes as you can't boot to a Volume over 2TB. You could put a drive on the other storage controller and boot from it but performance would really suck as it is likely a Jmicron controller.

 

[board2death986]

i also have a 4-port raid controller i could use for other devices, such as the boot-drive and dvd burner, i wouldn't be booting into the main storage array, i would probably setup a raid1 array for the OS drive, just for some extra redundancy (god knows i'll have some spare 500GB drives after I upgrade them to 2TB drives). 2TB are just getting affordable enough . . .

 

[InvisiBill]

Onboard RAID is sort of like a Winmodem - a lot of the work is done by the CPU. They work ok if you're doing RAID0 or RAID1, but suck at RAID5 where it has to do parity calculations constantly.

A lot of people like the Dell PERC5/i, which can be found as server pulls on eBay for less than the cost of that motherboard, and it will do a better job at RAID5.