Raid card VS Raid PC

[Megalomaniac]

I was thinking of getting a new Areca raid 5 card, bu then i kinda threw together a few figures and did the math.
it seems that the Nforce 4 mobos have a faily good RAID5 (4 drive all be it) setup

if i had an Nforce 4 mobo with Raid 5 on it and a gygabit network port, and had a new machine with dual Gigabit ports, i could basically save 200 bucks..
(math works like this, i have all the part currently in my old pc, except for the mobo itself and that sould cost about 100)

but im not sure if its worth it really.. \has anyone tried doing something like this?
(it would also double as a second folding box)

 

[Dillusion]

I was in a debate between a PCi-E x1 Raid card for 0/1/0+1....But i ended up just buying a mobo that had intel matrix storage on it, saved me money- but i tihnk the performance is the same?

 

[unhappy_mage]

it seems that the Nforce 4 mobos have a faily good RAID5 (4 drive all be it) setup

Well, the Areca has 8 ports, it's significantly faster, and you can move it to a new machine when the current one breaks or becomes too slow. That's its main advantage.

But I'd get the new board (it's another machine, after all ) and use it with Linux software raid. That gives you all the advantages of the Areca - portability, raid 6, expandability - and it's cheap.

PS: Albeit

 

[Megalomaniac]

i also wonder, if you have a dual core cpu, and you unload the Raid to one of the Cpus,.. that should presumably allow you to use the onboard raid, and not take as much of a perfomace hit...
Albeit i dont have any proof of it, and am just speculating..
any one have any experience with this?

also, i guess currently, the ARC-1220 for 500 is the best 8 drive satat raid, and teh ARC-1210 is the best 4 drive sata raid.. 300

 

[rodsfree]

But I'd get the new board (it's another machine, after all ) and use it with Linux software raid. That gives you all the advantages of the Areca - portability, raid 6, expandability - and it's cheap.

I tend to agree with u_m.

But I'm a little cheaper
I'd get a $30.00-$50.00 socket 478 mobo and a $40.00 cpu - like a 1.8Ghz Celeron and a couple of $10.00 pci HD controller cards.

Instant Software RAID File server for a lot less than the cost of mages favorite card.
Plus you can fold on it when it isn't file serving!

or

Hell, you can get a Silicon Image 3114 PCI SATA 4 port card with RAID 5 off ebay for $25 + shipping.

And this is the same controller that most of the nvidia RAID 5 motherboards are using. At least it is the same one that my SLI-DR Expert has.

And just plug it and all of your drives into your current computer. Might need new PSU though.

And FYI - tag your drives with the port number they are plugged into. It could save a lot of pain later. Just use a small piece of masking tape and a magic marker to write the port number on the drive.

 

[Dew]

And FYI - tag your drives with the port number they are plugged into. It could save a lot of pain later. Just use a small piece of masking tape and a magic marker to write the port number on the drive.

I also label the spots and the cables(just use a sharpie).

 

[unhappy_mage]

And FYI - tag your drives with the port number they are plugged into. It could save a lot of pain later. Just use a small piece of masking tape and a magic marker to write the port number on the drive.

Guess what - if you use Linux Software Raid, you don't need to label the drives. It keeps track of the order itself. So you can plug them into a different controller, swap the order around, move the array to a different machine, whatever. It's convenient.

And try Newegg for $25 shipped You don't need raid capability on a card if you're doing it in software.

 

[MrGuvernment]

I would not trust Windows Software raid, it is slow and doesnt perform as well as a dedicated card, that card is $500 for a reason.

personally i would get the card, it is made specifically to do one thing and the quality i think would supass any motherboard built in raid.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

I'm guessing about 50MB/s would be the transfer speeds. So it'll be a bit slower than a raid card. If you have a gigabit switch, and don't need more than that for a sustained transfer rate, the NFS setup you recommended would work great. I know I'd love to see another box folding, too

Oh, and the gigabit switch is assuming you're not going to have this plugged directly in to your main computer. With two gigabit ports, you could use this as a firewall between your main box and the net, too. I'm just emphasising that the use of a 10/100 switch would slow everything down. (I think it's about 12MB/s over 100Mbit)

 

[Megalomaniac]

Guess what - if you use Linux Software Raid, you don't need to label the drives. It keeps track of the order itself. So you can plug them into a different controller, swap the order around, move the array to a different machine, whatever. It's convenient.

And try Newegg for $25 shipped You don't need raid capability on a card if you're doing it in software.

ooooh!

raid 1+0 only...... how sad
or do you mean use linux raid and use the card for just the drives?

 

[unhappy_mage]

If you use Linux for the raid, all it needs are plain ol' sata ports. So you could do this with ports on the motherboard, IDE ports, scsi, whatever, regardless of whether the controller does RAID in hardware or not. So you could use the card I linked and plug the drives into it, not set up any raid with the card, and then in Linux set up an array using EVMS.

Make sense? So the controller talks to the drives individually rather than as an array, but Linux interprets these single-disk messages and conglomerates them into an array. All the controller need know is how to talk to single disks.

 

[general]

It doesn't sound like you're doing anything professionally here. If that's the case, then the performance difference of the hardware raid card isn't going to be much more than a software raid.

 

[rodsfree]

I would not trust Windows Software raid, it is slow and doesnt perform as well as a dedicated card, that card is $500 for a reason.

personally i would get the card, it is made specifically to do one thing and the quality i think would supass any motherboard built in raid.

We're not talking about Windows Software RAID..... that would be like $750.00 for a copy of Server 2003 to get that. Or he would have to do something that DRASTICALLY violated his EULA and we would never recommend that.

We are talking about Linux Software RAID.
It's free, works extremely well, will run on hardware that the $500.00 card won't even plug into, is even the basis for all of the stand alone NAS boxes that everybody is buying now, and did I mention that it's FREE!

Plus, you can't fold on a RAID card. It can't act as a network media server for streaming your music and videos over your network. It really sux as a webserver. You can't have it act as the Shut down manager for any UPS devices that your computers are connected to.
It can't automatically run backups on your other computers. If he's into graphics - the RAID card can't act as a render machine. Or music - try getting a RAID card to down-sample MP3's so more of them can fit on your player. And just where do you think you could hook up a printer on that card?

And for a small network, that only has a few users and computers connected over 100BaseT cable, or if he's lucky Gigabit, the access requirements aren't that heavy to require a high dollar card like that one.

So, here's the question.
$500.00 for a card that can do only one thing, but does it extremely well.
or
Less than $300.00 for an entire new computer that can do that same thing, about 70% as well, but can also be used to do a lot more. Hell, Dell is even offering a complete computer system for $277.00 right now.

Me, I'm building a file server out of old parts that would have been thrown away if I wasn't such a pack rat.
So my cost is even cheaper.

 

[Megalomaniac]

your right when you say that i dotn do anything professional.

i use my raid primary to store anime, pics and act as my juke box (for all the cd that i baught and used CDex to extract, naturally)

so its the Raid 5 part that i need the most...
i have an old Athlon slot A thats 700 or so which is my current suse box.

i also have an adaptec 2400A which is my current raid card (talk about slow performace) and the raid is almost full. the thing that always bothers me is when i do large dumps from one drive to the raid, is it takes up forever and then some... (easier and faster than defragging)
im not sure if it bothers me to the tune of 500 bucks, but it bothers me

and since its an athlon 700, it still has plenty of PCI slots, and even has ISA slots..


i have no problems running just basic stuff on it, but i wonder if the Raid would choke it?
i mean it will have a 100 MBps connect + Raid 5 stuff at the same time..

i have a spare 1800XP chip and ram, so all i need is a mobo, Nforce 2 or something like that.

Edit, found this also for it... so what are the best benefits of gentoo and EVMS?
http://ftp-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/...inux-adminguide_en/sec.yast2.system.raid.html

can i add extra drives to the raid 5 later?

 

[rodsfree]

Yes, you can add extra drives to the RAID Array later.

And that 100Mbps network connection is limiting you more than the RAID overhead.

Think about upgrading to Gigabit Ethernet.

Search ebay for the cards.... jumbo frames are nice but not required for what you are doing.

 

[MrGuvernment]

i had thought XP Pro was capable of software raid.

By all means, yes, linux would be a better option here , over windows.

 

[Farva]

EDIT: removed comment

 

[uOpt]

I would never use that onboard SATA "raid" controller based RAID.

The problem is very simple: if you have a semi-broken disk and you reboot, how does the support in the BIOS know how to sort it out now that the OS driver which had control is no longer aware of anything?

A whole lot of people lost raid-1 this way and I don't think it will be any better with raid-5.

Either do pure software RAID or buy two RAID controllers.

 

[unhappy_mage]

i have no problems running just basic stuff on it, but i wonder if the Raid would choke it?
i mean it will have a 100 MBps connect + Raid 5 stuff at the same time..

100 mbps is nothing. I mean, a Linksys box is basically a 200 mHz machine, and that handles 100 mbits fine. That'll be the limiting factor, though, so you might want to look into gigE. Best Buy had an 8-port switch for $40 this week, so it's reasonably priced these days. Add in a few $20ish cards and get at least triple the speeds. Possibly more with jumbo frames.

Edit, found this also for it... so what are the best benefits of gentoo and EVMS?
http://ftp-uxsup.csx.cam.ac.uk/pub/...inux-adminguide_en/sec.yast2.system.raid.html

can i add extra drives to the raid 5 later?

Gentoo? Well... if you really like editing config files, it's for you. I suggest Debian myself, since a netinstall takes me an hour to do and tune for an application. Can't beat that.

As for EVMS, learn it, love it, use it. It's easy (once you get the device-mapper built ) and it can add more drives to an array.

 

[rodsfree]

i had thought XP Pro was capable of software raid.

By all means, yes, linux would be a better option here , over windows.

No XP isn't.
It can access a Server 2003 Software RAID array but not create one.

To do so takes a software hack that violates your EULA and just suggesting something like that on this forum might bet you banned.

Removed Comment.

Protias - you need to delete this post before Kyle's BanHammer comes for you!!!!

 

[ne0-reloaded]

with that card and server 2003, could i setup a raid5 array? i get licenses free from my school for all windows products since im in the it program.

 

[rodsfree]

with that card and server 2003, could i setup a raid5 array? i get licenses free from my school for all windows products since im in the it program.

Server 2003 can do software RAID......
It just doesn't do it very well.

But - short answer = yes

 

[Megalomaniac]

what would be the file system that i need to use in order to make this volume seen by windows?

 

[unhappy_mage]

On Linux? It doesn't matter, you can use anything (although I like XFS). Samba takes an arbitrary filesystem and exports it over a network. Windows sees it as NTFS.

 

[Megalomaniac]

cool, so as long as i have it working as a raid in EVMS, the drives will be seen (mapped? if i map them) onto an XP system as NTFS drives automatically? (well after i set up sharing right for myself, username and all probably)


Edits:

also, Linux has VNC, right? so if i wanted to manage that linux box, i could just use a VNC client instead of a KVM?

After i created RAID 5 (left synchronous) in EVMS, do i want to create a Compatibility or an EVMS volume?
or even a featured object? im guessing compatibility, and i did XFS.
i loved it, at first i tried to do xfs, and it told me i needed to DL more stuff, so i dled, and less than 1 minute later was able to use XFS..

now i guess i need to share it out so that my windws machine would see it?
i would not mind password protecting it and maping it to windows...

installing samba, anything i should know about that might cause a glitch?

 

[unhappy_mage]

cool, so as long as i have it working as a raid in EVMS, the drives will be seen (mapped? if i map them) onto an XP system as NTFS drives automatically? (well after i set up sharing right for myself, username and all probably)

Well, they *can* be, but you need to set it up that way. Set up Samba on the Linux box, Map Network Drive on the XP machine, set to "remember", you'll be set.

also, Linux has VNC, right? so if i wanted to manage that linux box, i could just use a VNC client instead of a KVM?

Correctamundo. `apt-get install vncserver`. You'll probably have to make your own script to run VNC at boot if you want to do that, since it should run as a user (not root!) and it doesn't come with that capability. Something like this:

#! /bin/sh
case "$1" in
 start)
  su -H -u yourusername vncserver
  ;;
 stop)
  vncserver -kill :1 # not very generalized, should check what's in ~youruser/.vnc/*.pid
  # One solution:
  # for i in ~youruser/.vnc/*.pid; do kill `cat $i`; rm -f $i; done
  ;;
esac

After i created RAID 5 (left synchronous) in EVMS, do i want to create a Compatibility or an EVMS volume?
or even a featured object? im guessing compatibility, and i did XFS.
i loved it, at first i tried to do xfs, and it told me i needed to DL more stuff, so i dled, and less than 1 minute later was able to use XFS..

And that's one reason I love Debian I don't think it matters much for your application, but I think you need an EVMS volume for >2TB support.

now i guess i need to share it out so that my windws machine would see it?
i would not mind password protecting it and maping it to windows...

installing samba, anything i should know about that might cause a glitch?

Not especially. Read one of the many HOWTOs; if you get stuck post something and I'll help you out. Shell code is also a hobby of mine.

 

[rodsfree]

WNot especially. Read one of the many HOWTOs; if you get stuck post something and I'll help you out. Shell code is also a hobby of mine.

I hereby nominate unhappy_mage for the "Most Massive Understatement of the Year Award"

 

[dekard]

i had thought XP Pro was capable of software raid.

By all means, yes, linux would be a better option here , over windows.

Not to be too picky, but Windows Xp is capable of software raid levels 0 and 1. Raid 5 support is built in to the operating system of both XP and 2003 but only exposed in 2003. So, your not going to get an xp box to do Raid 5 without some illegalities.

Again, this is posted just to be accurate.