RAID 5 on a GA-K8N Ultra-9 AMD X2 (939) motherboard

[Alopez777]

Hi, I have a GA-K8N Ultra-9 motherboard and I am looking to setup my system with RAID 5. I have questions in regards to setting up my system with RAID.

Questions:

1.> Is it possible to setup Windows XP on a single drive (boot on this drive using Nvidia SATA controller) then setup 4 additional drives on RAID 5 (using Sil3114 controller) for storing data?

2.> My computer does not have a floppy drive, will I need to install a floppy driver in order to setup my RAID configuration? (Considering Q1 = Yes)

3.> Are there any forum members who have this motherboard GA-K8N Ultra-9 and have RAID 5 configuration? If yes, how is the performance with this configuration?

4.> Any tips or suggestions are much appreciated.


Many thanks,

Al

 

[TheBeagle]

I have the big brother of your motherboard, the GA-K8NXP-9, with a 4800 X2 CPU, and 2 GB of RAM. I have tried the configuration that you suggest in your inquiry. However, unless you utilize high-performance drives for this purpose, you will take a serious overall performance hit on your PC using regular (Desktop) drives. I would suggest a 74 GB Western Digital Raptor drive (new generation, 16 Mg cache) for your system drive which would only contain you OS and program files. Then set up your RAID 5 array using four Western Digital "YS" series drives, or four Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives. Make absolutely sure that the firmware on these RAID drives is the same and the most current. Both of these drives can be flash upgraded to the latest firmware, even though Seagate Tech Support will initially tell you that they can't. Also make sure you have at 2 GB of DDR-3200 memory on the board. The reason for all of the foregoing is that a RAID 5 array puts a serious load on the CPU. That's why many such RAID 5 arrays utilize a separate controller card, with an onboard processor, to take this load off the CPU. Hope that helps. TheBeagle

 

[Madwand1]

1. Yes.
2. No, you don't need a floppy, because you don't need to install the RAID drivers at the time of OS installation in this case, and can install the RAID drivers after the OS is running.

3. Here's a review that finds decent read performance, but poor writing performance:

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=r52005&page=13

The Silicon Image 3114 RAID-5 controller tested surprisingly well. Despite being a ?software? solution, the 3114 provided the best overall RAID-5 disk read speed, likely due to the pure simplicity of the architecture. On the other hand, RAID-5 disk write speeds were quite terrible...

It's not a good review though, and old. Things might have improved since then. You could try setting it up and measuring performance, degraded behavior, etc. before putting any real data on it.

4.

a. "RAID is not a backup". Esp. with inexpensive RAID implementations, you should go to an external system in addition if you value the data. This also makes RAID maintenance easier.

b. A Highpoint RocketRaid 2300 controller is not expensive considering drive costs, and can give you 4x RAID 5 with decent performance and a rich feature set. However, point (a) still holds.

c. RAID 10/0+1 might be an alternative, trading off various factors for perhaps greater write performance. With the affordable availability of larger drives, expansion is less of an issue that in the past.

d. "RAID is not a backup". You might simplify the redundancy setup on the desktop, improving performance and reducing cost, and rely only on external backups for redundancy.

 

[Alopez777]

Thank you for both reply's. Much appreciated.

I did some research yesterday and I have come to the conclusion that purchasing a RAID controller card (AMCC brand) is probably the best way to go. I am a little confused however on the following two cards:

3ware 9590SE SATA II RAID (PCI Express)

3ware 9550SX PCI-X to SATA II RAID

I know that PCI Express is older technology but what significant gains (if any) will I see if I go with the PCI-X model?

http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata2-9590.asp


thanks,

 

[Madwand1]

You got that backwards. PCI-X is older technology that's largely used by servers. PCI Express, or PCIe is the newer technology that's more appropriate for consumers and even in some cases new servers.

You need to check the available slots on your motherboard and number of PCIe lanes on the device and its compatibility (x1, x4, etc.).

A twist is that PCI-X is generally compatible with plain PCI, and so is generally broadly compatible with a large number of motherboards. The catches are: (1) Not always. (2) You come up against performance limitations when using the PCI bus for such high-bandwidth devices.