More RAID5 questions...

[CZroe]

I'm running a Promise SuperTrak SX6000 Pro with six 120GB WD1200JB drives. I'm still waiting on my PSU from NewEgg before I dare set them all up in the same array at the same time, but until then I have a few more questions.

First of all, it's common knowledge that RAID5 is no performance champion. It can't even be compared to RAID0 in any situation. BUT is a 3-drive array going to be slower than a 6-drive array or is the overhead still bottlenecking it even more?

The SX6000 appears to be their only card with an on-board dedicated Intel i960RM RISC processor for XOR calculations (The SX4000's hardware only accellerated a few functions). Will that go a long way in eliminating the bottleneck? If it's powerful enough, I'd imagine that it could support all six drives as easily as 3 and the performance WILL increase. Is that assumption correct?

I've been told that the latest BIOS supports 256MB SDRAM (128 max previously). Would it be worth it to upgrade that? After all, it already has 128MB SDRAM + 8MB cache per-drive (That's a lot of cache memory!)

Back to toying around with a 3-drive array...

 

[LordOfAll]

A 6 drive array will be significantly fasterin reads. writes won't change much, but since you selected raid 5 i guess write performance wasn't an issue. The processor is for calculating the redundancy, so it will increase write performance. the cache will make the biggest diff if you enable write caching. the danger there is if you lose power durring a write and the machine goes down, so its up to how much you trust your ups system. what is this system for?

 

[CZroe]

It's for house-wide system backups (Network Ghost-ing), shared file resources (CD-Image library for virtual CD-ROMs) and off-loading storage when needed (Temporary DVD image handling). I'm also fed-up with "catastophic" hard drive failures. It's running over Fast Ethernet and 802.11g at the moment, but I plan to run Gigabit between it and another PC ASAP. I heard that early i850 chipsets or all of them have less PCI bandwidth than they should because of some bug (Something like 80-to-100MBps instead of 133MBps), so Gigabit performance will be somewhat restricted... Especially because the RAID controller is sharing that bandwidth. I guess that's a question for another post

Where can I find the write-caching option in Windows Server 2003?