RAID 5 performance- Or RAID 3

[TheGoat Eater]

What kind of performance does this RAID provide - as so many have kind of freaked me out about RAID 0 now (what I am running now!)

How bad would it be to use a Mobo's RAID -> A8N32-SLI Deluxe is what I am thinking about.

But I think I might consider a Netcell NC5000 based controller such as the XFX SP-PCC5-G which is like the controller used in Maximum PC's Dream Machine 2005. Although it would be considerably more expensive with 5 drives and a controller - price wise I think I would be better off using 4 drives in RAID 5 off the mobo.

What do you think?

 

[rodsfree]

What kind of performance does this RAID provide - as so many have kind of freaked me out about RAID 0 now (what I am running now!)

How bad would it be to use a Mobo's RAID -> A8N32-SLI Deluxe is what I am thinking about.

But I think I might consider a Netcell NC5000 based controller such as the XFX SP-PCC5-G which is like the controller used in Maximum PC's Dream Machine 2005. Although it would be considerably more expensive with 5 drives and a controller - price wise I think I would be better off using 4 drives in RAID 5 off the mobo.

What do you think?

On-board RAID 5......Cool! That would be the cheaper option.
And if I understand it - RAID 3 is like RAID 5 but instead of Stripe-wise it is bit-wise.
There was a write up on one of the new cards that showed that it was slower than RAID 5.

But, I'm a cheap bastard and I'm not going to spend a lot of money that I don't have too.
That money would go to a SLI 7800GTX setup if it was me.

BTW....one of your linkies (XFX) is just strange.....it sends you to a country selection pg, and then to the product page after selecting your country.

 

[TheGoat Eater]

BTW....one of your linkies (XFX) is just strange.....it sends you to a country selection pg, and then to the product page after selecting your country.

HUH - try selecting you country then click the link again - I think it needs to know what language to show you

 

[RavenD]

price wise I think I would be better off using 4 drives in RAID 5 off the mobo.

What do you think?

Keep in mind that the onboard raid 5 controller (and cheaper controller cards) are software controllers, meaning that parity calculations are done by the cpu and system memory. You would probably be able to get approximately the same performance with them as with a hardware controller, but at the cost of cpu time. Hardware raid cards cost a lot (most are $300+). All that aside, raid 5 will have lower read and write performance than a single drive. IMHO, what you're best off doing is having a single drive for your OS, apps, and games, and a raid5 array for storage. A 74GB raptor or a 16MB cache SATA drive are two of the better choices for an OS/app drive. Then you can set up a raid5 array for storage. The best way to do this is to take an old box (P3 should be sufficient, though a faster CPU will give you faster writes), put a bunch of hdds in it, install the linux distro of your choice on it (a base install is best - no bloatware. If you make the box headless, you dont even need a window manager), and set up software raid5. Then throw it in a closet, and access the media over the network. Just make sure the box has a reliable PSU. Writes will be slower than with a hardware raid controller card, but that will make no difference unless you have gigabit ethernet. A 100Mbit connection only allows for a theoretical throughput of 12.5MB/s -- and that's before you factor in overhead. Even with a software raid, gigabit ethernet will definitely help in file transfers, however 100mbit is plenty for streaming data over the network.
If you do choose to just use the onboard controller, I would still suggest to use a single drive for your OS/apps/games. This will provide no redundancy, but higher performance; if you're worried about losing data due to the OS drive failing, just periodically make an image of it on the raid-5 array.