[Esot-eric]

Originally Posted by BlizzardUK

So for instance, if I was to use RAID 5 with on-board or cheap card, then my CPU will not be slowed down if it is not being written to ? If it is, then how much of a slow down would be noticed ?

If you're not reading or writing to the array (and it's not recovering from a dead disk) then you shouldn't get any slow down. Even when writing you should barely notice it.

My RAID5 array is in a server that uses a mobile class processor and i never notice any problems. The processor you intend to get is over 12 times faster so i really doubt you'll notice a problem.

But your planned use is beyond my experience, so i can't give an absolute assurance.

[BlizzardUK]

Thanks for info.

The motherboard I hope to get only has 4 port array as max, so if I decide to go for more drives, what do you think of this card ?

http://www.lambda-tek.com/AOC-SAT2-M...rd-~cs/1221500

[Keiō Line]

Originally Posted by BlizzardUK

Thanks for info.

The motherboard I hope to get only has 4 port array as max, so if I decide to go for more drives, what do you think of this card ?

http://www.lambda-tek.com/AOC-SAT2-M...rd-~cs/1221500

It's a "PCI-X" card not pci-express.
Is this what you want?

[BlizzardUK]

Originally Posted by Keiō Line

It's a "PCI-X" card not pci-express.
Is this what you want?

I thought the X stood for Express, ooops. So what is "X" then ? Is that server related ?

[whoever,hey]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI-X

Not to be confused with PCI Express (PCI-E or PCIe).

[Keiō Line]

Originally Posted by BlizzardUK

I thought the X stood for Express,

Rest assured you are not the only one to make that mistake.
It's was a bit silly to have two different standards with similar sounding names.

Originally Posted by BlizzardUK

. So what is "X" then ? Is that server related ?

I hope the wiki article explains it.

[Keiō Line]

Can I ask why you need so much capacity on a desktop?

[Esot-eric]

Originally Posted by BlizzardUK

The motherboard I hope to get only has 4 port array as max, so if I decide to go for more drives, what do you think of this card ?

With pure software RAID the drives don't need to be on the same card, so a cheap 2 port card will let you have your 5 drive RAID5 array and an extra drive for the OS.

If you want more drives then there are 4 port cards available for not much more (* this one is a older-style PCI card rather than PCI-E).

Both of those cards are only SATA 2, but since you're not going to be using SSDs they shouldn't cause a problem.

[Maxatoria]

Originally Posted by Keiō Line

Can I ask why you need so much capacity on a desktop?

he's messing with uncompressed video so its hardly suprising he needs a stupid amount of space to do his stuff

[Keiō Line]

Originally Posted by Maxatoria

he's messing with uncompressed video so its hardly suprising he needs a stupid amount of space to do his stuff

Okay (sorry if this was mentioned before).

I was thinking, of external esata solutions with caddies and the like. You would not have massive amount of space online at the same time, but you can swap in and swap out capacity (3tb at a time) as needed. With the risk of losing data due to a drive failure , but sometimes you can roll the dice on data that can be "generated" again. Also you can buy in extra drives should you need even more capacity. Data that you can not run the risk of losing can be stored on a "backup" disk.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Akasa-DuoDoc...429296&sr=1-18

http://uk.startech.com/Cards-Adapter...Card~PEXESAT32

[c4rv]

Originally Posted by Esot-eric

With pure software RAID the drives don't need to be on the same card, so a cheap 2 port card will let you have your 5 drive RAID5 array and an extra drive for the OS.

If you want more drives then there are 4 port cards available for not much more (* this one is a older-style PCI card rather than PCI-E).

Both of those cards are only SATA 2, but since you're not going to be using SSDs they shouldn't cause a problem.

OP was talking about motherboard based RAID 5, not software RAID 5 which is not support in consumer versions of Windows anyway.

In this instance, plug in cards won't help.

You could get a plug in hardware RAID controller. I have Dell PERC 5i which support 8 SATA drives, 256MB cache with battery backup and runs on a 8x PCIe slot. Only problem is it cost £150 + cables, and is second hand. On the plus side, it reaches up to 700MB/sec read and 400MB/sec write.

[Keiō Line]

As an example of things that can go wrong, I scavenged a perc5/i card from one server to go into a desktop. The next day I smelt "burnt resistor" and had a dead system. It turned out that the perc 5/i generates a lot of heat and relies on cooling typically found in dell servers but not in desktops.

After doing some googling I would say your best bet is to chance a second hand controller from a respected seller. Don't forget to look at battery options because on some cards (from certain manufacturers) they can improve performance (quite considerably).

[Loobster]

Originally Posted by Esot-eric

For home use hardware-based RAID is total overkill. Not to mention if the card dies you'll need to shell out for a new one of the same model or lose your data. There is very little hard work required for RAID5, it certainly wouldn't strain even the lowest-end Atom processor available today.

Go for pure software RAID using the SATA ports in the machine (and maybe a cheap SATA PCI-E card if you need more ports). I think even Windows supports some kind of built-in RAID, but of course FreeNAS (RAIDZ) or Linux will do it for free.

I don't even know where to start with that one.

Software RAID is ALWAYS a terrible idea, it's the highest performance hit and should only ever be used for data you don't care about.

And if your on-board chipset-integrated RAID 5 slopes off the duty to the processor, then there's certainly a significant amount of calculations involved.

No offense, but I don't know where some of the contributors to this thread got their 'knowledge' of RAID, but it's not even close to reality.

[c4rv]

Originally Posted by Keiō Line

As an example of things that can go wrong, I scavenged a perc5/i card from one server to go into a desktop. The next day I smelt "burnt resistor" and had a dead system. It turned out that the perc 5/i generates a lot of heat and relies on cooling typically found in dell servers but not in desktops.

After doing some googling I would say your best bet is to chance a second hand controller from a respected seller. Don't forget to look at battery options because on some cards (from certain manufacturers) they can improve performance (quite considerably).

If you did your research then yes indeed it generates a lot of heat. I've got one in a HP ML110 which relies on system cooling. The other is in a tower case which i put a heat sink / fan from an old gfx card. Both are running fine. Also remember that there are known BIOS compatibility issues with the PERC/5i so again as I would always suggest, do your research before you buy, its a specialist part not designed for consumer market.

But those are specific to the PERC/5i, there are other options available if you dig around.

The battery thing itself does not necessarily improve performance. What it does mean that if you decide to use write back caching then you have some protection against data loss in the eventing of sudden power failure. The PERC/5i will allow you to select write back even without the battery module and I know plenty of people who have enable write back caching on the RAID controllers without battery backup and not had problems in years of usage.

[Keiō Line]

Originally Posted by c4rv

If you did your research then yes indeed it generates a lot of heat. I've got one in a HP ML110 which relies on system cooling. The other is in a tower case which i put a heat sink / fan from an old gfx card. Both are running fine. Also remember that there are known BIOS compatibility issues with the PERC/5i so again as I would always suggest, do your research before you buy, its a specialist part not designed for consumer market.

"do your research", yeah it does come down to this, I was simply illustrating potential "gotchas". In my case it was simply building a system on the fly from parts I could scavenge. Grab, a drive from here, and a ram from there, without a moments regard to cooling needed for the card. Can't remember the purpose of the server, but it certainly wasn't production.

Originally Posted by c4rv

The battery thing itself does not necessarily improve performance. What it does mean that if you decide to use write back caching then you have some protection against data loss in the eventing of sudden power failure. The PERC/5i will allow you to select write back even without the battery module and I know plenty of people who have enable write back caching on the RAID controllers without battery backup and not had problems in years of usage.

HP cards didn't (don’t?) allow you to turn on WC without a battery attached. The result is a poorly performing card without the investment in the battery. Other manufactures had similar systems (but thankfully not most)

[Keiō Line]

Originally Posted by Loobster

I don't even know where to start with that one.

Software RAID is ALWAYS a terrible idea, it's the highest performance hit and should only ever be used for data you don't care about.

And if your on-board chipset-integrated RAID 5 slopes off the duty to the processor, then there's certainly a significant amount of calculations involved.

No offense, but I don't know where some of the contributors to this thread got their 'knowledge' of RAID, but it's not even close to reality.

No software raid is not always a terrible idea. If you need to protect against a hard drive failure for mission critical work then it is much better than having no protection. Sure performance will be poor, but sometimes reliability increases is more important than performance decreases. It would be nice to have a hardware RAID controller, and I would strongly encourage people to use them rather than using SW raid, but we all work within limits, in this particular case the limit would be money.

I don’t understand why are claiming it should only be used for data you don’t care about. It should be used for data you wish to protect against drive failure.

No offence but some contributors need to appreciate that we live in a world where performance is not the only criteria when considering hardware choices

[Loobster]

Anyone who uses software RAID for a 'mission critical' application has the IQ of a plantpot.

[Keiō Line]

Originally Posted by Loobster

Anyone who uses software RAID for a 'mission critical' application has the IQ of a plantpot.

Or budget restrictions.

Rest assured I don't think we are talking about banks and building societies using software raid. "Mission critical", simply implies something you NEED in order to be able to do your job, that can be something as trivial as having access to word documents.

I think you will find the plantpot people will be more than happy to be able to continue to work after a disk failure. As I said it's better than no protection at all for "mission critical" work, and that is an all to common scenerio.