- Jul 15, 2005
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A few months ago I picked up 3 Seagate 400GB drives when Fry's was letting them go for dirt cheap. A couple of weeks ago the price dropped again so I picked up a fourth. I'd had the first 3 running in a RAID 5 on my DFI NF4 board, and just dumped everything on them to external and added the fourth HD to the raid. Performance seemed very reasonable when I only had the 3 drives but now that I've added the fourth it seems extremely slow. Copying about 400GB back to the raid took around 8-9 hours from a 500GB external. Copying another 100GB over my 100mb network also seemed to take a really long time. Additionally, when I right click and hit properties to check how much space is being used by the folders that hold my music and movies it takes a long time to count it all up, about a minute compared to 10-15 seconds on my other machine that has the same data stored on just 1 drive. The machines are virtually the same, Opteron 165 and DFI NF4 SLI-DR boards in both, Seagate 400GB 7200.10 drives. I expected some overhead from the RAID but not this much, and I didn't expect adding another drive to impact the performance like it has, so I'm wondering if I should buy a discrete RAID controller. Of course, this is basically just a fileserver for my media so I'm not looking to spend hundreds of dollars on it, maybe a hundred or so tops. Is there a RAID card in my price range that would give me better performance or should I just suck it up and leave it be?