Windows Server 2008 Software RAID 5 performance?

[ScottFern]

I am setting up a file server currently with 5 x Samsung 1.5TB drives (5400rpm) in RAID 5 software in Server 2008.

This is a home built server with a ASUS ICH10DO chipset and a 2.6 Pentium D and 3GB of RAM.

I was looking for some general guidance on what I can expect as far as performance goes. I would like to see 60+ MB/sec on both read and write but not sure what its going to turn out to be?

I am currently resynching the RAID 5 array and its at 33% so I won't be able to test it with optimal performance until tomorrow sometime.

 

[Arcanedeath]

Raid 5 without some type of hardware write cache my perform poorly depending on how they implemented it.

 

[pjkenned]

Pass on Windows Raid 5. Read speeds aren't great. Write speeds are really bad.

 

[ScottFern]

I actually just bought a RAID controller off of the forums here. Adaptec one so I am not going with the software RAID 5 after all.

 

[Nothinman]

I tend to stay away from Windows software RAID just because it uses dynamic disks and virtually nothing understands them properly. Linux software RAID on the other hand is awesome and I would recommend it over most hardware RAID controllers these days.

 

[zephyrprime]

If you could get a ICH10R (which has intel raid support) instead of a ICH10DO board, I would really recommend it. A ICH10R board should be pretty cheap on ebay and you can sell you current ICH10DO on ebay as well.

 

[Emulex]

yeah you really want bbwc or fbwc so you can have write-back mode on to reduce the pain of the read-write-read of hardware raid-5. also make sure you never reset/lockup/lose power to that raid. why most people separate storage from (everything else) to prevent a failure from taking out the raid integrity.

please for the love of god - manually fail a drive and have it rebuild - know your rebuild time. the longer the rebuild time - the more time for another failure to occur.

 

[ScottFern]

I ended up buying an Adaptec RAID controller 31205 from For Sale section, but now I can't get the raid controller to detect my samsung 1.5TB drives!