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Is NCQ worth buyng a new RAID card?

C

crobusa

Senior member
I plan to install Windows 2003 Enterprise 64 as a AD controller, 5 (100MB small) instances of SQL Server, File Server, and DNS.

I've comitted to the dual opterton Tyan S2882-D, which has onboard Sil3114 SATA RAID.
I purchased 2 Seagates 300Gb w/ 32mb cache, and am planning for RAID 1.
I'm trying to do it on the cheap, but I was wondering if getting another RAID card would help. If I stick to onboad, I'll probably get another 1Gb of memory.

Thanks
 
I'd say your better off sticking with what you have unless you have massive files you need sharred. I would say instead of a new RAID card get 2-4GB of memory for a better server.
 
Sorry it was off the top of my head. I remember there being 2 different caches, and I picked the higher one. It could of been 8Mb/16Mb
 
I don't think buying a new card just for NCQ would be worth it - more RAM would be a better option, but may not give you that much more speed anyway.
 
I think it would be worth it if you were doing a very large RAID 5 array with many hard disks.

For your setup you probably wouldn't see a really big performance increase.

Although NCQ would be very well suited for database applications.
 
The problem with onboard RAID chips is you can't move the RAID array to a new PC later on. If you use a separate PCI card, you can just pick up the RAID card and the drives and plop them into the new server, load the RAID card's drivers into the new OS, and immediately read the old array.

If you use an onboard RAID controller, you'll have to backup the contents of the array, move the drives to the new PC, create a new array and format it, and then restore the data to the new array. The RAID array probably won't be readable on a different computer unless it has an identical RAID controller chip.

Similarly, if your motherboard fails and you need to replace it, you may have to get an IDENTICAL motherboard or may have to restore the entire array using backups.
 
Originally posted by: RebateMonger
The problem with onboard RAID chips is you can't move the RAID array to a new PC later on. If you use a separate PCI card, you can just pick up the RAID card and the drives and plop them into the new server, load the RAID card's drivers into the new OS, and immediately read the old array.

If you use an onboard RAID controller, you'll have to backup the contents of the array, move the drives to the new PC, create a new array and format it, and then restore the data to the new array. The RAID array probably won't be readable on a different computer unless it has an identical RAID controller chip.

Similarly, if your motherboard fails and you need to replace it, you may have to get an IDENTICAL motherboard or may have to restore the entire array using backups.
Click to expand...

good point
 
Seriously? I thought you could break the array, have 2 copies of the data, and then create an array from the "target drive".. I've sent 2-3 emails to various raid card manfs, and 1 or 2 said this was possible. What am I missing?
 
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