ive got this mobo with sata on it, but not sata raid. However, it does have pata raid on it. ive got a sata hitachi deskstar 160gb running as my system disk and also have a spare ata133 maxtor +9 80gb doing nothing. so im thinking of getting the maxtor hooked up to another ata133 +9 80gb and running that as raid0 on parallel interface and keeping the sata drive for programs etc. Will this work well or am i just wasting my time?
Hmm, RAID is almost a big enough topic for its own forum (actually, there are a few if you look for them ) Anytime there is onboard RAID with a current generation motherboard, you're looking at a CPU driven solution, i.e. the CPU does the grunt work, and the controler just does the directing. The reason that a 3ware RAID card often costs hundreds of dollars is because it's an independent hardware driven solution, i.e. the RAID card does everything, and just uses the PCI bus to send/receiev data, offloading almost all of the workload from the CPU. Phone modems are in the same category, i.e. a WinModem is a CPU/software driven modem, whereas a full duplex modem is fully hardware driven. Most CPUs nowadays have so many extra unused cycles that running the modem functions doesn't even phase them. RAID on the other hand, especially "higher" levels like 0+1, 5, etc., are HEAY data processes that will even strain a hotrod like the athlon64. Check out http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd7/ for a more in-depth review of the nuts and bolts behind this process if you get a chance. OK, technical background has been covered, on to the actual application! It really depends on what you want the RAID for, and how you set it up. If you're just looking for a little faster drive performance, but don't need fail-safe redundancy, then just use striping (RAID 0). Movie editing/playback is a common use for this. If you want redundant/failsafe operation, use mirroring (RAID 1). You only get 50% of the total drive space, as each drive is mirrored by another identical drive. The only real way to see if it's a worthwhile effort is to set it up and play with it to get a feel for the actual performance in your environment. Reviews and benchmarks are all fine and dandy if you have an identical setup, but few of us do, and often have very different uses/demands for our systems. If you can scare up another IDENTICAL drive, by all means go for it! Just make sure that they really are the same, as the drive spindles etc. have to match to make the system work correctly.
First I'd advise you that RAID increases chances of failure, corruption and can make upgrading more difficult. Not only that but it doesn't improve speed much at all, even striping. The main problem with onboard is CPU usage as said. However there's also an inherent problem that (AFAIK) ALL IDE is linked via the PCI bus so 133MB/s shared between it and all PCI (and often onboard) devices. That's puny for 2 HDs. SATA isn't imune to this either, unless it's native and very few are. Native RAID or PCIe RAID stand a chance, but IMHO it's still not worth the money, time or risk.
Only if you use RAID 0 (which isn't really RAID at all ) any other form of RAID offers you redundancy thus reducing the chance of failure...
seems im hearing familiar things from you guys!! Thanks for the replies - i guess im thinking that i dont have ny particular use for raid then! Was just curious as its something i havent tried yet.
Are there any boards that have a seperate chip as do most boards for parallel raid? Like a promise chip that supports sata raid? I found a 2 port card if you're looking to do raid 0,1 for $135 but s**t that's a lot to spend. Adam
I'm not sure I understand the question... Are you asking about the availability of dedicated (non-software) RAID SATA controlers? If so, 3ware makes about the only commercially available ones, and you're looking at closer to $335 for a card. But, the same caveat of PCI bus bandwidth applies, unless you have 64 bit/66MHz PCI slots.
Promise do a 4port sata 32bit pci hardware raid5 controller for about £120 on komplett.co.uk somewhere, i ordered one a couple of days ago
Here's a new question for y'all then. I'm using the Promise RAID built into my mobo (raid 1, coz I killed a disk last year thru overheating, mind you, if it gets too hot I'll just kill both so meh). I know this is also attached to the PCI bus, but will it be doing most of the processing on the promise chip, or is my cpu going to be involved? And if the opinion on here is that RAID is a waste of time, what else should I do with a couple of 250Gb SATA drives? (also know as: How to make 100s of people reply with 'send them to me!')
Your cpu will do all the thinking Use them seperately to get the full amount of storage without risking losing it all at once
buy another one and a raid 5 card, thats what i did seriously, just hook them up to the raid controller but dont put them in a raid array
Well I actually meant is are there any mb's with native sata support via a dedicated chip? A lot of boards that support PRaid have a dedicated chip for the raid array... Adam
Mobos which impliment proper RAID as opposed to hanging it off the PCI bus are the newest nForce2 (GB edition, but minus Soundstorm), Intel i865+ chipsets and I think Athlon64 mobos (thanks to HT?). This means you aren't sharing a nasty 133MB/s bottleneck between your SATA HDs, PCI devices and onboard stuff BUT due to cost concerns it will surely still be using the CPU for the majority of the RAID work. So it may be better to wait for PCIe SATA RAID cards? For optimal perf it would probably be best to ensure the HDs are real native SATA rather than bridged, there should be big speed gains from native command queuing. IIRC Maxtor's new 16MB cache SATA's are both native and support NCQ. The price for all this 'cutting edge' hw is going to be a lot though!
