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Raid 5 - On board?

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ShaunBrewer

Member
Joined
Mar 1, 2003
Location
UK
Guys,

Anyone know of a board with Raid 5 on board?

I was just about to buy a PCI card when I thought there might be a board with raid 5 already - only I have drawn a blank looking for one.

Thanks

Shaun
 
I dont recall any boards that have RAID 5 onboard. Unless your looking or a server board (which might or might not have it onboard), I doubt you will find anything. Heck, many board makers dont even include RAID 0/1/0+1 onboard anymore. Your best bet would be to just pick up a RAID 5 card, and go that way.
 
Most consumer-level onboard raid and cheap PCI raid soloutions don't contain much hardware. There is an ide controller and most of the raid functions are offloaded to the CPU by the driver. RAID 5 requires a good deal more, I would recomend a hardware PCI-based controller.
 
Any board with the HighPoint 374 RAID Controller has support for RAID5, you will need to include the RAID BIOS update to your MoBo's BIOS & flash for this to work. Epox & Abit have boards with these chips.
 
Thanks for the replies

has a look at the Epox site looks like the

EP-8K9A3+ and EP-8K5A3+

have the 374 controller

will look some more on the Abit site

looks like older boards only - may have to go the seperate card route.

Was thinking the extra money might buy a better board and onboard should/might:) guarentee compatability.

Sonny - sorry to be a bit dim can you post any links to how you make boards with the 374 raid 5 - looking on the ABit site at the AT7-MAX2 has 374 chip - but does not mention raid 5?

Thanks again


Shaun
 
The HP374 is only be RAID5 capable when used with V3.01 - V3.03 BIOS. To do this you must edit an existing Motherboard BIOS to include the "RAID5" HighPoint BIOS then FLASH the MODIFIED MoBo BIOS to your board. I suggest you contact Tmod about BIOS Editing.
 
Even if an onboard RAID 5 chip existed, I wouldn't use it. The performance is probably no better than a software RAID 5, and it will eat up CPU cycles doing XOR calculations. And a good RAID 5 chip would have to comsume a lot of PCB space.
 
Thanks again all,

Okay probably going with the RocketRAID 454 4-Channel ATA133 RAID 5 Host Adapter.

This will be in an NF7-S v 1.2 board (this is my server).

I realised I needed shed loads of disk space when I tried to download 10 hours of digital video un-compressed.

If anyone thinks the card I am considering is a bad idea please shout now.

Thanks again

Shaun

P.S. The server will also be used for some database stuff - but only testing.
 
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