3 raptors

[footballrunner800]

im putting 3 raptors 74gb drives on a raid0 array. Would having a dedicated raid card improve performance by a lot?
I have a p5k- premium mb with the ich9r sb. If i added a hardware raid card, it would be limited to 4x pci express. I do not know if this would be a bottleneck in the raid card. I do not care about redundancy.



Cm Stacker 830/Koolance Exos-2
Asus P5k Deluxe (1600MHz)
Q6600 water block (3.6GHz)
4x1GB Corsair DDR2-800 (1:1) 4-4-3-8
XFX 8800GTX 660mem 1050mem (koolance water block)
Roswell 750w
3x74gb WD Raptor (2 in raid 0), 2x250gb WD caviar (raid 0)
Vista x64

 

[LOUISSSSS]

you're aware that raid 0 doesn't do much for 95% of home users right... but by all means go ahead and get a dedicated raid card. you might see an added 1-2% real speed increase over the 1-2% real speed increase of using onboard raid.

 

[Nothinman]

Would having a dedicated raid card improve performance by a lot?

Nope, the reason that RAID levels like 5 and 6 work better with real RAID cards is because of dedicated XOR engines to calculate parity and battery backed cache memory. Your CPU can handle the striping without any real performance hit and I doubt you're going to pay for a card with battery backed cache.

I do not care about redundancy.

Apparently not, I eagerly await the thread on recovering data from a RAID0 array that you'll be posting in a few months.

 

[Lorne]

The 4x slot will easly handle any raid controller, Probably well beyond what the cards own limitations are.
The internal MB raid is only a 1X and would probably would handle 3 raptors, The limitation being the controller itself, It wouldnt really matter if you got a sotware or hardware driven controller if your only intent would be A AID-0, If your intent would later be RAID-5 or 6 then hardware would be suggested.

Ive never seen a battery backed cache, Once the HD's power down the info in the cache would be usless.

 

[nerp]

Get one 150GB raptor and a 500GB or 1TB 7200RPM Seagate or Samsung and you'd be better off, IMHO. Raid 0 sucks for home users and the performance benefit is minimal and most people are imagining the speed difference when they claim that they notice one.

 

[footballrunner800]

Thanks for the replies. I see that harware raid is mostly for higher raids. Ill stick with my motherboad's raid. I was thinking of buying some of the newer big platter drives but i'll wait till i build my next rig. ( I don't care if raid fails i keep all my games and schoolwork backed up on a 500gb drive)

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Lorne
The 4x slot will easly handle any raid controller, Probably well beyond what the cards own limitations are.
The internal MB raid is only a 1X and would probably would handle 3 raptors, The limitation being the controller itself, It wouldnt really matter if you got a sotware or hardware driven controller if your only intent would be A AID-0, If your intent would later be RAID-5 or 6 then hardware would be suggested.

Ive never seen a battery backed cache, Once the HD's power down the info in the cache would be usless.

Here is the battery unit for an Areca card

Areca spec listing for their RAID controllers -- "Battery Backup Module (BBM) ready ARC-6120BA-T1xx, xx means version no." near bottom of "Adapter Architecture.

 

[Rubycon]

Motherboard raid gives little boost in real world performance outside of STR gain on reads. The drive's firmware is highly dependent on performance. Going to a real hardware based IOP controller with at least 256MB of cache (1-2GB is much better) will give excellent results. Even with a single drive!

 

[Lorne]

Nice selling gimmic, Cost out weighs the PC use where it would do best, Over netservers it might be be a 50/50 shot, Imaging business network it would be a waste as 99pct of power loss causes data lost moving across the CAT not to mention the cache is empty 99 pct of the time since the raid is so much faster then the network.