RAID setup for Windows desktop

[J3lly]

Hello,

I'm looking to upgrade my current desktop storage setup. It's currently RAID 0 with 4 x 1TB disks and has been running pretty much non stop from 2008. This should have failed already but for some reason keeps on going...

Due to work (and games) I'm running Windows 7. My mobo is an Asus P8P67 Deluxe so I have 2 x SATA 6Gbps and 4 x SATA 3Gbps through the chipset (I think the onboard Marvell and JMicron controllers are of little use).

What I'm looking for is a tad more redundancy with minimum impact on I/O speeds. I'm currently thinking about running hardware RAID 5 through the chipset with 3 or 4 WD Red 3TB disks connected to the 3Gbps SATAs.

Is this the way to go for a daily use gaming / workstation setup? Any other sw or hw RAID setups that I should consider for better performance? Is the WD RED an overkill if paired with NON-ECC memory, in which case I should go with lesser 7200rpm disks?

Thanks!

 

[Aesma]

This is not hardware RAID, the CPU will do all the work, and it will perform a lot more slower than currently, especially for writes. For reads (games for example) it should be OK. I would definitely use a SSD for the OS and applications that can benefit from it, then RAID5 HDDs if you must, but I sure hope you do backups !

 

[J3lly]

Oh I see now, thanks for clarifying that. I somehow though that the chipset had the hardware for this. Reading on about RAID performance for the P67 indicates that the write speed is lousy in RAID5 while RAID 0 and 1 require little to none CPU utilization so RAID 10 could be a possibility but at the cost of space and performance...

I would still like to have a solution close to n-1 performance but I guess this will require a separate hardware RAID controller.