motherboards with raid 5

[ibp]

i was just wondering if there are any motherboards that come with ide or sata raid 5 support?

 

[Zepper]

Nope. Some used to have a special socket for an add-on board (SCSI), but they were mostly multi-processor and/or server mobos and all SCSI. Never seen IDE raid 5 on a mobo at all as they should have dedicated memory and processing power that takes up too much acreage on the board, so probably never will be integrated.
.bh.

 

[ibp]

bummer , thanks tho. looks like i'll be looking at promise for some of their cards, need to get mobo with 64bit pci first tho, wonder if i should wait till pci express comes out and see what they can do with that.

 

[Woodie]

Many 64-bit PCI add-in cards (a la Compaq) will run ok in a 32 bit slot...just loses 1/2 the bandwidth to the card.

There weren't very many IDE RAID5 solutions (none???)...since RAID5 requires a minimum of 3 drives. SCSI RAID controllers are available relatively cheaply these days, but the SCSI drives are still nowhere near as cheap as the IDE drives. Especially when you have to buy them in threes!
(long-time SCSI RAID user)

 

[Peter]

You can e.g. buy a 64-bit PCI (or PCI-X) capable mainboard with a SCSI controller on. Most of these mainboards have a special "Zero Channel RAID" PCI slot that lets you plug in a special card and use the onboard SCSI controller for RAID5. Without that card, you can still use the onboard SCSI as plain mass storage (JBOD).

 

[smahoney]

Promise makes a pretty good SATA RAID controller that will run 32 bit 33MHz and has additional cache memory up to 256MB. Worth looking at.

 

[althes]

epox 4pca3+ uses raid 5 ide.
the new epox springdale board uses sata raid 5.4sda5+ i think is the name.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: althes
epox 4pca3+ uses raid 5 ide.
the new epox springdale board uses sata raid 5.4sda5+ i think is the name.

Consumer and prosumer class boards (i.e. not the server boards mentioned before) will not implement RAID 5 in hardware. It will be done through software, which gets expensive in CPU time (RAID 5 requires a lot more math than the "lesser" RAIDs). You can get a RAID 5 card from 3Ware - they make models that can have up to 8 (or are there 12-port ones?) IDE or SATA drives. I've not used one personally, but those who have generally say that they are very good.

 

[Jayczar]

there are Intel Xeon Boards that offer RAID 5 configs.