Onboard raid vs dedicated card raid(raid 5)

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Any advantages or disadvantages over them?

I have been having some bad luck with just using hard drives, as I do not have back ups, so, now I am thinking I'd like to get a raid 5 setup going.

I have been looking at motherboards and dedicated cards.

Its going to be a little spendy the way it is, as I'd like to go with a 6 drive(750gig) raid 5 setup. I shouldn't need to upgrade the capacity for a long long time. Also, are there any drives that would last longer then another? I am not after performance, as its going to be a file server, and not have a lot of thrashing.

I don't plan to run anything else in the box but the array. No optical drives, etc.
 
I have always been told that anything built into the the motherboard is going to use CPU cycles (more so then an external card).

That being said, if this is going to be a home server with only a few users, you are better off using the onboard RAID, IMO. This will save you some money. That's just my opinion.
 
Using onboard is a much cheaper option because you buy the board and you are done, no need for another card. However, running off the motherboard posses a problem and that is if your motherboard just decides to not turn on, you have to find another motherboard with the same RAID chipset for the drives to work again. Even then it is dicey on whether or not it will work, with external RAID cards, if the motherboard dies, you just pull the card with all the drives and slap it on to another motherboard and you are good to go.
 
Would any on board options allow spin up to be delayed, as not to over-draw from the PSU?

I am thinking I'd like to setup a 6 drive array, and maybe step up to an 8, meaning, I'd like to possibly add drives, but, its all up in the air.
 
6 drives isnt an issue with a good PSU. I have 6 in mine and use an 850w PSU.
A 650w in your case owuld be fine if its just a file server.

Now onto the raid question - onboard raid is called fake raid it uses software to formulate the array - it also is more cpu intensive then an add in card

Add in card will almost always be faster (as long as you use a good bus like PCIe) and be doesnt drag on the CPU for software calculations.

The downside to add in cards is cost and configuration.
Cost - well thats up to your wallet
Config - if you can set up an on board array you should be fine with the add in card
 
If I end up doing the server I'd like to, I'd like to use a c2d processor and a gig of ram.
 
i am using about 8 drives with a 380w psu with no problem.

if i was you i would not go near onboard or software raid, caused me a massive loss of time in the last couple of weeks. i am now running no raid at-all untill i can afford a controller.
 
ring.of.steel said:
i am using about 8 drives with a 380w psu with no problem.

if i was you i would not go near onboard or software raid, caused me a massive loss of time in the last couple of weeks. i am now running no raid at-all untill i can afford a controller.
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Who makes a good hardware raid controller? Sata or IDE?
 
3ware make good cards so do areca.

Highpoint are good if your on a budget but read the specs carefully to make sure it is actually true hardware raid.



 
sc0tty8 said:
Who makes a good hardware raid controller? Sata or IDE?
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Well, IDE is pretty much out as the technology is really good for SATA. For about $250, you can get the Highpoint 2320. It's not a hardware based card like the Areca, but it's better than the BIOS Raid from motherboards. unhappy_mage has a post somewhere around here regarding all the different Raid cards.
 
Going IDE wouldn't bug me, I'll prob get seagate drives, 5 yr warranty, and, in 5 years I'll prob be onto sata 5:)
 
sc0tty8 said:
Going IDE wouldn't bug me, I'll prob get seagate drives, 5 yr warranty, and, in 5 years I'll prob be onto sata 5:)
Click to expand...

In 5 years we'd probably be in Solid State drives. ;) :p

IIRC, SATA drives are cheaper than their IDE counterparts.
 
If you go software raid using the windows disk management cant you recover your raid on any computer with windows installed on it? no worries about dead cards or dead motherboards etc... I know when I screwed around and made a software raid on one computer, then migrated one of the disks to another it asked me for the other hard drive so it could put them together again.

As for the downside of eating up clock cycles.... Its not like many programs peg both of my cores at the same time while doing some heavy hd usage. Might as well put that stagnant second core to use for something.
 
Does anyone have any benchmarks for software versus hardware raid - I'm thinking of setting up a 3 disk raid 5 setup on my Gigabyte DS3 board - and was wondering how much of a performance hit I'm gonna take for the increased disk performance :p
 
All I could find was this article with no benchmarks. Its mostly advocating the usage of software raid in servers to get rid of the bus limitations etc... of hardware raid. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/is_4_20/ai_62409008/pg_1

I tried it myself though with my Raptor + Maxtor. Maxtor benchmarks at 44avg mbs, raptor at 65. Together they got ~80avg mbs. That was a small partition though and I dont know what part of each drives platter it was on.
I have no idea how to install windows on a software raid unless the built in software raid of XP pro recognizes its self when installing XP.
When ive had to deal with installing windows on a hardware raid 0 array though I usually chose to back up an image of a windows install with all the drivers, fav games installed (even if on a dif drive, just for the registry entries), etc... etc... installed, then copy that onto the raid partition. If crap goes bad you just copy it again.
 
i was using a 4 disk onboard raid 5, and honestly, it was lacking in performance. it was an intel 965 chipset. read speed was awesome, but seek time, and write speed were sub par, even below that of a single drive. i was running it on a c2d and 2gb of ram too. get the add-in card. you won't regret.
 
does your onboard support raid 5 ? i know alot of them do not


even if it does, raid 5 requires alot of processing when writing, as it has to generate parity information


external cards that support raid 5 and don't use the cpu for calculations, are probably gonna be server grade, and cost big $$$
 
Verge said:
does your onboard support raid 5 ? i know alot of them do not


even if it does, raid 5 requires alot of processing when writing, as it has to generate parity information


external cards that support raid 5 and don't use the cpu for calculations, are probably gonna be server grade, and cost big $$$
Click to expand...

You are correct. The parity calculations are what makes RAID5 eat up more CPU cycles than RAID 1 or 0 would. Additionally you are also correct in that any controller with it's own XOR processing engine is going to cost big money. (When I say big, I mean $450+.) Many motherboards these days do in fact support RAID 5 and though the performance is slower it isn't as bad as you might think. Will a high end board smoke it performance wise? Absolutely, but the cost vs. performance ratio won't be worth it for most.

sc0tty8 said:
Any advantages or disadvantages over them?
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Plenty. A higher end RAID controller will be faster in almost all circumstances. They'll also have a nicer feature set and you can always move the controller to another machine in the event the box dies and you need to access the array. There will also likely be a much more comprehensive tool set included with the card in software and in it's BIOS for rebuilding arrays and diagnostic testing. However we are only talking about software RAID using Windows. In Linux or other OSes the tools and performance can be quite a bit better.

You can rebuild arrays created in Windows and the performance on a modern machine is far better than it used to be. Unfortunately you can't expand online drive arrays or anything like that using Windows. (Not sure if this is true for Vista or Server 2008.)

sc0tty8 said:
I have been having some bad luck with just using hard drives, as I do not have back ups, so, now I am thinking I'd like to get a raid 5 setup going.
Click to expand...

RAID is not a backup. They are two very different concepts. You would be wise to learn the difference and plan accordingly. In short RAID only provides redundancy for uptime. It does not secure your data. Virii and data corruption can be perpetrated throughout the array and you can loose all your data anyway. Backups of your data kept in a safe place on a non-magnetic medium is the way to go. For example I store my important data on DVD's secured in my 600lb safe which is fire rated and bolted to concrete. I have very little important data but what is important is duplicated there as well as on several of my machines. Data that's not personally sensitive but important has also been given to friends to store at their houses in case my home and machines, and even my safe are all completely destroyed. Sounds a bit extreme for personal data but I assure you that it's not hard to implement and the cost is minimal in my mind compared to the value I place on the data in question. (No it's not my pr0n collection.)

sc0tty8 said:
I have been looking at motherboards and dedicated cards.
Click to expand...

I'm curious as to what onboard solutions and what add-in boards you've been considering.

sc0tty8 said:
Its going to be a little spendy the way it is, as I'd like to go with a 6 drive(750gig) raid 5 setup. I shouldn't need to upgrade the capacity for a long long time. Also, are there any drives that would last longer then another? I am not after performance, as its going to be a file server, and not have a lot of thrashing.
Click to expand...

If cost is an issue then look for a software solution. A good hardware card from LSI, Areca, 3Ware or Intel will cost you serious cash. Don't kid yourself these sub $250 cards are not in the same league or even the same sport as a higher end card. Those cheaper cards are hardware accelerated RAID solutions that use the chip onboard to accelerate the software solution. So they are of the same basic type and design as a onboard RAID controller on a motherboard. In fact many of these cards perform far worse than their onboard counterparts due to being on the PCI bus instead of the PCIe bus. Some of them just physically run slower than the onboard solutions integrated into the chipset.

sc0tty8 said:
I don't plan to run anything else in the box but the array. No optical drives, etc.
Click to expand...

If you are not worried about performance than a software RAID in Windows will be good enough as you can read those disks in another machine if needed. RAID cards are necessary only to those seeking absolute performance and the ability to use the array on any platform should the machine the array resides in die for some reason. I like add-in boards because I don't have to rebuild my drive setup every time I change motherboards. (Which I do fairly often.) You can't build an array using Intel's Matrix RAID and then read those disks as an array on a NVIDIA chipset based motherboard using an NVRAID setup. They just aren't compatible. An add in board means that the chipset on the board is a non-issue for me as I migrate my hardware around or upgrade frequently.
 
Dan_D said:
If you are not worried about performance than a software RAID in Windows will be good enough as you can read those disks in another machine if needed..
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just dont use windows raid, its really not worth the hassle and has proved to be very un reliable for me. constant resyncs etc
 
My $0.02

Personally, I've been looking into making a linux file server to store files (duh), music (FLAC), run a torrent client, a mythtv-backend and have been planning on running RAID on the filesystem. Considering I'll be throwing in 1TB drives to store data and really no way to back up the data (backing up several TB doesn't really work well without tapes (ewww) or more harddrives. Even with tapes, I'd rather just go with RAID and hope for the best. I know it doesn't help me against viruses, accidental deletion, file corruption, etc; but it'll be good enough.

In either case, I'd rather not run software RAID as any time you write to the drive, the processor has to calculate the XOR info. That combined with the paranoia of failing drives push me to look at RAID6 and a real controller; this of course, has it's benefits:
  • Losing drives *and* data is less likely. 2 drives can fail and I'll still be alright. I could just go with RAID 5, but for the cost of an extra drive and assurance, I'll spend the extra bit of cash.
  • A real controller also allows me to expand the array (adding drives in) while the system is running. This is something that's just coming around in software RAID in Linux, but I'd rather go with something that definitely works.
  • Much better performance. I hate waiting for stuff to transfer over the network. With the extra card, I should be able to saturate the two gigabit connections on the server and still have room left over for the server to continue working with the drives.
  • Array monitoring and all around better support.
 
Sparkyy said:
Using onboard is a much cheaper option because you buy the board and you are done, no need for another card. However, running off the motherboard posses a problem and that is if your motherboard just decides to not turn on, you have to find another motherboard with the same RAID chipset for the drives to work again. Even then it is dicey on whether or not it will work, with external RAID cards, if the motherboard dies, you just pull the card with all the drives and slap it on to another motherboard and you are good to go.
Click to expand...

This scares me.

Surely finding the same motherboard or motherboard with the same raid chipset wouldn't be difficult? unless your motherboard died after 10 years.

In the event of a dead raid card or dead raid motherboard, would the array not be recognized by any other motherboard raid chipset or raid card.
 
Tomson said:
This scares me.

Surely finding the same motherboard or motherboard with the same raid chipset wouldn't be difficult? unless your motherboard died after 10 years.

In the event of a dead raid card or dead raid motherboard, would the array not be recognized by any other motherboard raid chipset or raid card.
Click to expand...

You are correct. If you are using anything other than a software solution you run the risk of not being able to recover the array at all due to lack of a spare card or a motherboard with compatible chipset. RAID is for redundancy and is not a backup. As always a good backup strategy is advised. Then you can do whatever you like with minimal fear of data loss. You can always rebuild your array on a different controller.
 
I see, in that case I think for myself its better to get a highpoint card, with the amount of users they must have I would think a replacement 2-3 years down the line wouldn't be too difficult? I take it in industry when they set up a big array they buy a couple spare cards.
 
Tomson said:
I see, in that case I think for myself its better to get a highpoint card, with the amount of users they must have I would think a replacement 2-3 years down the line wouldn't be too difficult? I take it in industry when they set up a big array they buy a couple spare cards.
Click to expand...

Honestly I don't think it's worth buying a seperate card at all unless you go high end.
 
Dan_D said:
Honestly I don't think it's worth buying a seperate card at all unless you go high end.
Click to expand...

I was thinking of onboard but I was a bit put off by what I read about what happens in the event of failure - basically losing my array, sp started thinking of cards just to have peace of mind.

So unsure now. I know that I don't require anything super fast as at most 2 clients pc's would be accessing it to do no more than watch a ripped dvd, so buying a $600 areca card is just overkill for my needs. Main thing I require is OCE and reliability.
 
Tomson said:
I was thinking of onboard but I was a bit put off by what I read about what happens in the event of failure - basically losing my array, sp started thinking of cards just to have peace of mind.

So unsure now. I know that I don't require anything super fast as at most 2 clients pc's would be accessing it to do no more than watch a ripped dvd, so buying a $600 areca card is just overkill for my needs. Main thing I require is OCE and reliability.
Click to expand...

Cheaper cards aren't going to give you any more piece of mind. They are just as failure prone as the onboard solution is.
 
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