Software RAID 5

[pOwErEd By NOS]

I would really like to have a RAID 5 setup for redundancy and slight performance for my upcoming build. I was looking at a good RAID 5 card but I don't want to spend an extra $300 on one. My question is how much of a CPU hit would I take going with a software RAID 5 with a X2 3800+? Would I even notice it with normal usage? I don't do a lot of HD usage just the normal surfing/mp3/downloading.

 

[/dev/null]

I would really like to have a RAID 5 setup for redundancy and slight performance for my upcoming build. I was looking at a good RAID 5 card but I don't want to spend an extra $300 on one. My question is how much of a CPU hit would I take going with a software RAID 5 with a X2 3800+? Would I even notice it with normal usage? I don't do a lot of HD usage just the normal surfing/mp3/downloading.

Is this under windows? You didn't specify...
I'm currently doing raid5 under windows with 4 * 400GB seagate drives and the performance is horrendous. Think 7-8MB/second writes.

If anyone knows how to improve this, please post.

The individual drives will do ~ 30+MB/second, so I don't know why it's so bad under raid5. This is on a dual opteron 246 box (2ghz, NUMA, 10+GB/second memory bandwidth, 2G ram) and the cpu load is pracitcally 0.

Rob

 

[Drudenhaus]

Window's RAID sucks nutts. If you have a Sillicon Image controller (3114 is pretty common) on your board that has a software RAID 5 capability you might want to read this. Write speeds will be terrible using any kind of software RAID, but you can get good read speeds and redundancy at that sacrifice.

 

[provoko]

I was about to post the same article from gamepc. =) Don't do software raid, don't do mobo raid either unless it's the only thing you can afford. Go with a sepearte raid controller, it won't hug the CPU and it'll be faster than mobo raid.

The cpu factor won't affect you since you have dual core, but still raid controllers read/write faster.

 

[Ice Czar]

http://cgi.ebay.com/Promise-Technol...oryZ3666QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

http://cgi.ebay.com/Promise-Technol...ryZ39968QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

6 channel IDE card with dedicated XOR RISC Processor and support for upto 128MB PC133 SDRAM cache (those already have em)

RAID 0, 1, 0+1, 3, 5 and JBOD

I got mine some 4 years ago and its still going strong, not a performance card but an affordable choice off ebay with six channels for better storage efficency

 

[rodsfree]

I would really like to have a RAID 5 setup for redundancy and slight performance for my upcoming build. I was looking at a good RAID 5 card but I don't want to spend an extra $300 on one. My question is how much of a CPU hit would I take going with a software RAID 5 with a X2 3800+? Would I even notice it with normal usage? I don't do a lot of HD usage just the normal surfing/mp3/downloading.

If you are just doing it to do it..... my advise would be don't.

Software RAID 5 isn't going to give you a performance increase at all. It's place is in a dedicated server box than has nothing better to do than sit in a closet and server up files for the working computers on your network. That way the performance hit you take in doing software RAID is mitigated by the transfer speeds of your network.

If you want some increase in speed and some redundancy without the costs of a dedicated RAID card then set up your mobo's RAID 0+1 onboard controller. I'tll require 4 drives to do it. Get a really good double layer DVD-R for the offline backups of your "have to save data" and a safety deposit box at a local bank for offsite storage. If you are paranoid, like me.

Luck!

 

[pOwErEd By NOS]

Hey everybody thanks for your advise. Yeah it would be with one of those on board el-cheapo RAID 5 controllers. So basically everybody is saying don't do it. Thanks.