Motherboards Window 7 Pro RAID5 in EVGA E758-A1 X58??

I am planning a new build with a Core i7 & EVGA E758-A1 X58 Motherboard . I will purchase a 1 tb hard drive, however, i want to utilize my 3 spare SATA hard drives laying around at my room.

the motherboard is RAID 0/1/0+1/5/JBOD certified, and has 9 SATA Ports.

My question to Tech Support (or even Hardware Support) is:

1) will this work with Windows 7 Pro?? I have a Windows 7 Pro 64bit from MSDN.

2) will this Raid5 be safe for my motherboard?

3) how much space would i possibly get? Hard drive spaces are 1tb, 320, 250, and 120

4) should i get 2x 500gb hard drives instead of 1x 1TB hard drive????

5) other things i should know that i didnt ask... =]

Thank you!!

 

While technically you don't need drives of the same sizes for RAID5, you really should.

For instance, if you use 320+250+120GB disks in RAID5 you'll get around 220GB of usable space, kind of a waste.

1) Yes, but I wouldn't use RAID5 for a boot volume, especially with an onboard controller.
2) Sure? Define "safe"
3) smallest drive * (number of drives - 1) = total space
4) If you want to use RAID5 then get 3+ drives of the same size/model
5) Are you using RAID5 for redundancy or performance? With odd-sized drives you're better off setting up a decent automated backup system than putting them in RAID5, and its safer too.

 

Thank you Mister_Tad,
I am looking for performance, and I heard that Raid5 is the safest, and also fastest. I am surprised to hear that the smaller drives determine the overall capacity.

What i meant by "safe" is would on-board controller be trust worthy? i think the motherboard is hardware based (instead of software).

 

Exactly what kind of performance are you looking for? Typical desktop usage would benefit very little performance wise from RAID5 (and would most likely deteriorate with anything but pure hardware RAID)

Onboard RAID5 processing is still done in software (hardware controllers start from around $400 and climb rapidly from there)

Your data is still safe in the event of a disk failure, however if your motherboard dies you may find it difficult to recover any data unless you replace it with an exact match (ie, controller firmware, motherboard bios, hardware revision)

 

hmm...
I guess i was hoping to get a high read and write speed, if i implemented some kind of Raid scheme.
I have these extra drives laying around and i was hoping use them for something.
I will be using this computer for photoshopping, programming, and other hardware intensive stuff, especially gaming and movie playing.
i will be using a backup 750gb hd to protect my important sensitive stuff like documents, invoices and photos. the raid scheme i was hopping would inprove my desktop overall performance.

so do you think i should just not use raid5?? or should i just use raid0 on the 2x 500gbs?

 

You will get high sequential R/W speeds with RAID5 (in theory, though with an onboard controller this may not much much better than a single drive). Desktop performance, however, depends on a great deal more than just high sequential throughput.

If you've already got a decent backup scheme (that you stick to!) I would ditch the thought of RAID all together. There's no real point in doing it in a desktop environment for anything but specialised tasks, and you're more likely to do harm than good unless you spend a bundle on it. I used to run an 8 disk RAID5 setup on an Areca controller and while yes, it was quicker than a raptor for loading apps/games, it was only a little bit quicker.

IMO you're best off selling your smaller drives and pick up a modern and fast 1-2TB drive. If you don't need all that much space, consider pairing a small SSD up with your 1TB drive.

 

There's a [H] link in another thread on here regarding ssd's in raid0 - it pitched a RocketRaid 4310 card against ICH10R and they weren't exactly miles apart in terms of performance.

Ah, here we go. I'd be tempted to get two ssd's and raid-0 them for OS duties, then a 1 - 1.5TB drive for backup/files.

 

There won't be a massive difference between onboard and dedicated RAID0, there's very little processing to be done. Its the parity calculations in RAID3/5/6 that chew through cycles.