Windows 2000 Software RAID 5 ?

[Pluto]

Does Windows 2000 software RAID support RAID-5 ? Has anyone got any experience with it. What is the performance level compared to a hardware IDE RAID-5 controller ie. Promise or Highpoint. Thanks.

 

[mikecel79]

Win2k has RAID 5 capability but I can tell you that it's performance is not going to be even close to what a dedicated controller is. RAID 5 takes quite a bit of processing power so you'll see a pretty big performance hit unless you have a really fast CPU. Also Win2k software RAID 5 cannot be done on the boot drive.

 

[Nothinman]

You don't want to do that, really. Also if performance is important you should probably look at 15K RPM SCSI disks, they're expensive but the lower latency really helps.

 

[Pluto]

But does a Promise/Highpoint IDE RAID controller actually have a dedicated processor like a more expensive SCSI RAID card?

 

[xenos500]

only w2k SERVER supports software raid-5, it works fine.

 

[Nothinman]

But does a Promise/Highpoint IDE RAID controller actually have a dedicated processor like a more expensive SCSI RAID card?

The ones that do RAID5 will, but they'll also be more expensive.

only w2k SERVER supports software raid-5, it works fine.

But it uses a lot of extra CPU time to calculate all the parity bits and you can't use it on the boot or system volumes.

 

[Pluto]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

But does a Promise/Highpoint IDE RAID controller actually have a dedicated processor like a more expensive SCSI RAID card?

The ones that do RAID5 will, but they'll also be more expensive.

Would the Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 or Highpoint RocketRAID RocketRAID 1640 be any better than software raid-5 ?
These are the only cards I could really afford.

How much better are we really talking here? The system is a P4-2.4ghz, there is not usually disk and CPU intensive activity going on at the same time.

I've used Software raid-0 and raid-1 in the past and found the performance acceptable, I'm just looking for some performance gains over using simple stacked volumes without having the zero-redundancy of raid-0 (can't afford a high capacity backup system but don't want to lose the data if a single drive fails either)

 

[Nothinman]

I've used Software raid-0 and raid-1 in the past and found the performance acceptable, I'm just looking for some performance gains over using simple stacked volumes without having the zero-redundancy of raid-0 (can't afford a high capacity backup system but don't want to lose the data if a single drive fails either)

RAID 0 and 1 take so little CPU time because they have nothing to compute, it just has to decide which disk gets which sector, with RAID 5 parity has to be computed.

I don't have any numbers to give you though because the only software RAID I use is SCSI disks in RAID 0 or 1 and it's Linux software not Windows. If you already have the disks why not do some testing for youself before you buy the RAID card?

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

only w2k SERVER supports software raid-5, it works fine.

But it uses a lot of extra CPU time to calculate all the parity bits and you can't use it on the boot or system volumes.

It boggles the mind to think that companies are too cheap to add a few XOR gates in hardware.

 

[Pluto]

what hardware would these XOR gates need to be added to? The ATA/SATA chipset?

Anyway, I found a review of the Promise S150 SX4 RAID-5 card, the reviewer commented that the card "relies on the server CPU to operate" Link

My main purpose for this RAID volume is capturing DV video, and then later encoding it to MPEG2. While the capturing phase is hard disk intensive, I don't believe it would need much CPU power. Whereas the MPEG2 encoding uses the CPU and the hard disk transfer demands are I believe minimal. Does anyone think that using software RAID-5 (or even a entry-level RAID card like the Promise or Highpoint) will impact either of these tasks noticeably?

 

[Pluto]

Another question concerning the win2k server software raid-5, can you add drives to it without reformatting the array?