What motherboards support IDE RAID5?

[Heretic]

What Athlon motherboards support IDE RAID5? I've things I've seen only does RAID 0/1/0+1 but no 5 built into motherboards.

 

[Athlon4all]

None. RAID5 requires it's own RAM and CPU for the RAID 5 calculations. No mobo will ever have RAID5 on-board. You'll need a PCI card for that, and that PCI card will likely set you back $700-1500 at the least depending on weather it's IDE or SCSI.

 

[Boonesmi]

3ware has some nice ide raid cards that support all the cool raid features (including raid 5)

the escalade 7410 costs about $350, it has 4 ide channels (meaning you can use 4 harddrives all set as master)
the 7810 im not sure of the cost, but it has 8 ide channels

 

[Heretic]

<< None. RAID5 requires it's own RAM and CPU for the RAID 5 calculations. No mobo will ever have RAID5 on-board. You'll need a PCI card for that, and that PCI card will likely set you back $700-1500 at the least depending on weather it's IDE or SCSI. >>



That's hardly accurate. I know for a fact there are multiple RAID5 MBs with a SCSI interface. I myself have a SCSI only system, but I was thinking a nice like 4 drive RAID5 array with 120MB WD1200JBs would be good for a video editting station I want. You can pick up an Adaptec U160 RAID controller for $400. I'd imagine you could find a much cheaper IDE RAID controller in the $100-$200 region. I know both Promise and HighPoint, the two most popular onboard RAID ASIC makers for MBs have IDE RAID5 parts. I just wish it were on a motherboard because I don't want to saturate the 133MB/sec PCI bus. But whatever, not that big of a deal.

I just checked. Promise has 6 channel RAID5 controller for $246 on pricewatch (SuperTrak SX6000; 6 Channel ATA100 IDE RAID 5).

 

[Peter]

You got the point there, without noticing 🙂 Those "onboard IDE raid" mainboards use standard dual channel PCI IDE chips,
and then put (CPU driven) firmware and drivers on that do the mirroring and striping.

If you want RAID 5 for true redundancy et al, you need to have a separate RAID processor somewhere that handles
the drives transparently, so that the CPU sees a single mass storage unit. That's what these RAID SCSI cards do, they have
a number of standard SCSI chips on, but these aren't visible as SCSI controllers to the CPU, they're hidden behind a RAID
entity that distributes and reassembles the data that then go over the PCI bus.

There's also a massive difference in PCI load. Do mirroring with the former, cheap CPU driven solutions, and enjoy the
doubled PCI bus load. Not something you want when you're after performance. With real got-my-own-brain RAID solutions,
just the assembled data go over the PCI bus.

Besides, what do you think onboard controllers connect to? Thin Air Warp Speed bus? No, it's just the same PCI bus that runs
to the slots as well. Whether you have it on a card or on the board, it's going to eat into the same PCI bus bandwidth.
(The exception being chipset-integrated components, and coming soon onboard native HyperTransport controllers.)

regards, Peter

 

[Heretic]

<< You got the point there, without noticing 🙂 Those "onboard IDE raid" mainboards use standard dual channel PCI IDE chips,
and then put (CPU driven) firmware and drivers on that do the mirroring and striping.

If you want RAID 5 for true redundancy et al, you need to have a separate RAID processor somewhere that handles
the drives transparently, so that the CPU sees a single mass storage unit. That's what these RAID SCSI cards do, they have
a number of standard SCSI chips on, but these aren't visible as SCSI controllers to the CPU, they're hidden behind a RAID
entity that distributes and reassembles the data that then go over the PCI bus.

There's also a massive difference in PCI load. Do mirroring with the former, cheap CPU driven solutions, and enjoy the
doubled PCI bus load. Not something you want when you're after performance. With real got-my-own-brain RAID solutions,
just the assembled data go over the PCI bus. >>



Or does it? I thought the RAID0/1 controllers in the motherboards handling the striping/mirroring in hardware and thus the stream was broken up at the controller. RAID5 requires a processor/memory to calculate the parity information that is striped across drives. I'm more worried about how the RAID controller connects to the MB. ie Does it just take up a PCI connection, or does it connect to the southbridge through a seperate link so not to share bandwidth with other PCI devices. Probably wouldn't matter that much given realistic drive performance.



<< Besides, what do you think onboard controllers connect to? Thin Air Warp Speed bus? No, it's just the same PCI bus that runs
to the slots as well. Whether you have it on a card or on the board, it's going to eat into the same PCI bus bandwidth.
(The exception being chipset-integrated components, and coming soon onboard native HyperTransport controllers.) >>



I've seen layouts of say, the KT333 chipset, and it's southbridge had a seperate connection line to a HighPoint RAID controller that was clearly disctinct from the 6 PCI connections. The built-in IDE controller on the southbridge doesn't share PCI bandwidth (ie it's not on the PCI bus and the southbridge<=>northbridge connection supports ample bandwidth for both) so it would make sense for an onboard RAID controller to connect more intimately to the southbridge than through a PCI link. Also, I've seen KT333 motherboards with onboard sound, onboard LAN, and onboard RAID with 5 PCI slots. With a max of 6 PCI connections to the southbridge, two of those onboard devices must not use a PCI connection.

*shrugs* If I were a baller, I'd just go dual athlon with a 64bit SCSI RAID card and 15K RPM drives, but i'm not. Actually, there are 64bit IDE raid cards aren't there?

-ryan

 

[Boonesmi]

the 3ware cards i mentioned above are 64bit

and im curious what boards you were talking about that have onboard raid5 support?


raid5 requires hardware based raid (unlike the promise/highpoint/ami which are all software based)

 

[Heretic]

Oh, I've seen some ServerWorks boards with a i960 controller on it for RAID5. I've also seen boards with on-board SCSI and to get RAID5 all you had to do was add a zero-channel RAID5 card (ie adds RAID5 ability to existing SCSI channels). Yea, that's hardly IDE RAID tho, which is why I'm asking.

Still... That 6 channel RAID 5 card looks cool. $1250 for half a terabyte of striped, redundant, high throughput storage. That just sounds fun.

~$250 - 6 channel controller
~$200 x 5 - WD1200JB

 

[jaeger66]

Heretic-any onboard RAID controller will still use the PCI bus. The only onboard devices that don't must be integrated into the south bridge of a board that has a dedicted north/south bridge link.

 

[Heretic]

Ok, the 3Ware 7450 and 7850 are completely badass. That's definitely what I'd go for. I checked out the benchmarks on storagereview, it kick ass for seqential read and write which is the emphasis of what I'd want to use it for.

 

[Peter]

KT333 does _not_ have any non-VIA-proprietary busses other than AGP and 33 MHz, 32-bit standard PCI.

The VIA V-Link only links up north and south bridge, that's all. You cannot connect to the southbridge
"more intimately" than through this one and only PCI bus.

ServerWorks and AMD 762 chipsets have twin PCI busses, and of course you'll want your mass storage
to be on the 66 MHz 64-bit bus there ... but it's still PCI.

The first non-proprietary bus standard for faster-than-PCI onboard peripherals will be HyperTransport.
It'll be a while until the usual suspects come up with HT IDE or SCSI controller chips though.

regards, Peter