Hardware or software RAID??

[brashquido]

Ok, I had pretty much set my sights on the GIGABYTE GA-7VRXP as I was planning to setup 2X 30GB IBM ATA-100 7200RPM HDD's in hardware RAID 0 on the RAID controller built into the board. However, I've read on other hardware sights that the IDE RAID controllers built into motherboards such as the GIGABYTE GA-7VRXP, are nothing more than glorified software RAID, and don't offer any performance gains over software RAID. Is this true? If so I may as well get a non RAID board and save myself a bit of cash.

 

[Acanthus]

yes they are software, might i add they run like grabage, often losing data clusters causing windows and other programs to fail over time. I hate integrated raid controllers with a passion, the only reason i would order a board with one is to run more hard drives in one comp, in a non-raid configuration, i highly reccomend a PCI raid controller over integrated raid.

 

[brashquido]

So it wasn't just me! I've got a Iwill SIDE-100 RAID 0,1,0+1 using the HPT370 chipset in my Windows 2000 machine, and I have to format it every 4-6 months as the thing just gets data corruptions all over the place. In that case, what's a good RAID,0,1,0+1 card then?

 

[Acanthus]

to tell you the truth, raid 5 has the most redundancy (needs 3 drives), and raid 0+1 requires the most drives (4) but is very reliable as well, raid 0 gives the most performance but is the most likely by far to fail, and theres no way to save data on a messed up raid 0, you just format and start it over again. Raid 1 provides no performance increase, but has redundacy against losing data, raid 5 isnt supported by integrated raid controllers, but its stripe set with parity, it requires at least 3 drives, it striped like raid 0 but uses special parity data so that if one of the 3 (or more) drives fails you can install a clean formatted drive and it can REBUILD the data on the lost drive from the parity data on the other 2, there is a penalty for this though, you lose one drives worth of data. Say you have 3 80GB drives, on Raid5 you would only have 160GB of storeable space, but it would be fast, and very hard to lose data. RAID5 is whats used by most businesses with large scale data storage servers.

 

[Boonesmi]

hardware based raid cards are very expensive

but they do have good performance, plus you can run raid 5
software raid supports 2 drives in either raid 1 or raid 0, and the only time it supports more then 2 drives is if you have a raid 0+1 then it can handle 4 drives

hardware raid can have as many drives as the controller supports

as for hardware based IDE raid here are a few choices:
3ware makes several (7410, 7450, 7810, 7850) but the cheapest one is about $300
adaptec has the 1200A and 2400A cards
and promise has the SuperTrak SX6000


if i could run any type of IDE raid it would be the 3ware 7850 with 8 harddrives in a raid5 array

 

[brashquido]

I want a decent hardware RAID 0 setup on this machine as it'll be the one I use for all my DVD authoring, Video editing, and 3D animation. Basically anything requiring a fair wack of CPU, ram or I/O performance will be done on this machine. I was going to get a dual CPU system, but the techs at Pinnacle advised me against it as their hardware has been known to cause problems in SMP systems. Specs are going to be as follows;

Althlon XP 2100+
512MB PC2700 DDR
GIGABYTE GA-7VRXP
Leadtek Geforce 4 MX 64MB
???? RAID Controller ????
2 X 30GB IBM ATA-100 7200RPM HDD's in Hardware RAID 0
Pinnacle Studio Deluxe
Pioneer DVR-A04
19" Hitachi Monitor
Windows 2000 Professional SP2

I have 3 X Maxtor 160GB ATA-133 5400RPM HDD's setup in software RAID 5 on my server just for data storage, with the system partition setup on 2 X Western Digital 10GB ATA-66 5400RPM in software RAID 1. This is where I'll be keeping everything apart from works in progress, so the the lack of redundancy in my production machines hard drive array isn't to big of a concern, in its case I'd much rather speedy I/O performance. I was looking at the Promise FastTrak100 TX2 as an option. Does anyone know what it's I/O performace in a RAID 0 configuration is like?

 

[Boonesmi]

the fastrack 100tx2 will have about the same performance as any other software based raid card, or any motherboard with onboard raid

if your looking at the tx2 you would be just as well to get a mainboard with onboard raid

 

[SuperPickle]

whereas I can agree with my KG-7 board and on-board controller have't given me much increase in performance and have experienced a drive failure (needing a total rebuild) I will say onboard RAID has its place. A friend of mine has 2X40GB drives in RAID0 for the perfomance and a 80GB 5400rpm drive to back it up every week. this gives him, in the loosest sense, equivelent to RAID 5 as he can rebuild every week and still has lots of storage space if he abandons RAID blah blah....

you get 4 more IDE channels with a RAID board even if you don't use RAID. That's worth the cost to some that want that extra PCI slot and want drives on their own cable.

You must weight the cost of onboard RAID and 2 more IDE controllers (4 devices) against the marginal performance gain and the additional cost.

 

[brashquido]

Hmmmmmm......... Is there a decent RAID card out there that only does RAID 0,1,0+1, the adaptec 1200A for example? I don't need any RAID level other than 0 for this system, so I don't want one with all the bells and whistles such as RAID 5 (even though that would be cool). Coming from another angle, what if I gave up on the hardware RAID idea, and just used software RAID found in Windows 2000 Professional. Would that give me any worthwhile increase in I/O performance over that of just mounting the HDD's as two seperate disks as normal?

 

[Boonesmi]

after reading your last post i would suggest you look at a couple 3ware models, the 6200, 6410, 7200.. they cost a lot less then their big brothers (the are around $100)

but the 3ware 7410 at newegg for $230 is totally awesome

just run a search on pricewatch for "6410" its an ata66 card but that wont matter because it only supports a single drive on each IDE channel, and since no drives are faster then 66mbs the performance is the same as if it was ata100, or ata133... its a 4 channel card that supports 4 harddrives and the cost is around $100

 

[brashquido]

Thanks for your help Boonesmi! I'll check it out.