Intel Z68 (particularly ASUS P8Z68-M Pro): How is onboard RAID 5 performance?

[orian]

It appears to be very difficult to find reviews where there is mention of the onboard RAID 5 performance of an Intel Z68 based motherboard. I was wondering if anyone had any feedback on RAID 5 performance numbers on the Intel Z68 boards, or knew of a review that had some info. Thanks for any help!

 

[aviat72]

I think you answered your question. With the cost of storage falling so much, RAID 5 is no longer considered useful on a system with a few number of disks. Just go RAID10.

 

[Massive Overkill]

Really, disks are cheap nowadays. Unless you like really long rebuild times and parity errors from not scrubbing...........just do RAID10.

 

[greenhawk]

onboard raid has not changed noticablly for a long time seeing as it is still done the same way (basically software). Without a major change, review numbers from a few years back would still be "close enough" for a ball park performance numbers.

Besides, as mentioned above, most people are just not interested in motherboard raid as much as they use to be. Serious users still use hardware raid (addon cards, $500+), enthusiests are more liking to go SSD, and maybe raid 0 on that if they want speed. Some home users will be raid 1 for data protection because of the size of the drive ect.

does not leave many people interested in it when true software raid from linux is generally a better option for performance and flexability.

 

[Diogenes2]

With Z68, I would go with 2 x large spindle drives in RAID 1 for protection + 64gb SSD cache for performance ..

 

[orian]

Maybe I'll check out ZFS and FreeNAS. They sound like a promising solution for my needs as well. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Maybe I'll check out ZFS and FreeNAS. They sound like a promising solution for my needs as well. Thanks for the feedback.

Nobody seems "wrong," but I think Diogenes has it most "right." My last hardware-RAID5 system was consuming over 300W of power. I haven't measured my Z68 system yet, but since an SSD may consume at most 0.7W of power, my two-HDD system is using less than half the power of the old RAID5 system.

I've moved away from RAID solutions. You could easily create a two (or more) drive RAID0 on a Z68 board, and then cache it with ISRT. You might see throughput or sequential reads above 800 MB/s. But with the right SATA-III SSD, you can cache an SATa-II 1TB drive and obtain slightly less than half that speed. You probably wouldn't notice the difference, because this latter configuration is likely four times faster than a single HDD.

I don't need RAID5 "reliability," since there is regular, automatic backup to a WHS server; I clone my single system HDD (the "accelerated" drive with ISRT) monthly with a hot-swap unit; and I back up the server with a similar hot-swap unit. Otherwise, an ISRT-cached RAID1 would be "feasible" for me. In my case, the second HDD (uncached) is for video captures, photos and MP3 collections. The latter two categories are backed up and don't change much or frequently, and I could easily lose some TIVO captures without shedding many tears. And . . . . I'm planning to expand my WHS a bit, so . . . there you are . . .