nForce 570 RAID

[xollox]

Greetings everyone.

I'm looking at getting an Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe with the nForce 570 northbridge. Has anyone tried setting up 2 different RAID sets with the nForce's builtin controller? I'm looking to do a 4x drive RAID 5 set and a 2x drive RAID 0 set.

I'm pretty sure it'd be possible if I used a port multiplier with the secondary JMicron controller , but I'd prefer not to go that route.

Any thoughts? Thanks in advanced.

 

[Madwand1]

Not sure about the 570 specifically, but my nForce 3 and nForce 430 both allow multiple arrays, so the 570 is likely to as well.

 

[xollox]

Thanks for the reply.

I understand that these are software RAIDs. How's the performance on them? Does the CPU usage spike when you're doing a lot of disk I/O?

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: xollox
I understand that these are software RAIDs. How's the performance on them? Does the CPU usage spike when you're doing a lot of disk I/O?

I've had mixed results. I've never had a real problem with RAID 0 performance, but sometimes RAID 5 performance has been abysmal. And then, with nothing more than a recreation of the array, the performance has come back to being great.

Conclusion? Bugs kill RAID dead. You should also have an external backup somewhere of the data you really care about.

I haven't paid much attention to CPU utilization. The theory-based rants against software RAID have probably greatly exaggerate the CPU impact. Typically performance is not bad because a modern CPU can't keep up. When performance is bad, it's typically because the implementation is bad, and the CPU is just twiddling its thumbs.

When you have a real data load, you can expect the CPU to be busy for several reasons. Good performance is correlated with high CPU utilization to a degree. The CPU's meant to be used. If it's idling, what's the point? Of course, there are cases where you already have a heavy CPU load, and don't want any more to be taken up by the storage controller -- in such cases, a hardware-based controller can give you some advantage. And there are others. The main downside with good hardware controllers is obvious -- cost.