Four Raptor Xs on a 680i

[Fodder]

Hi everyone,

I have a 680i NV ref mobo, four Raptor Xs, and a 500GB external drive for backups.

I plan on pulling my WD74GDs this weekend and dropping in my four Raptor Xs. My question is how many of them can I put into a RAID 0 array before I reach the point of bus saturation on this board or experience degraded access times. I was initially thinking putting all four into a RAID 0, but I saw somewhere that this doesn't work so well on this board. Unfortunately I keep coming up with no hits when searching for it again, so does anyone have any data on this? I'm also wondering if two drives in two RAID 0 arrays will result in saturation as well.

Thanks for your time and input,
~Fodder

[Joeteck]

Well the NVRAID can only do 4 drives, so you're SOL. But I believe its 6 before you start loosing...

Need to get an Intel chipset, with an ICH9R south bridge. This can do up to 6 drives..

EDIT: and then the gigaRAID can do another two in RAID 0 or 1...

[Scott9027]

If the nVRAID can only handle 4 drives, I'm not sure why he's having a problem. I would look into getting a board with an Intel chipset with Matrix RAID and an ICH9R southbridge as suggested.

[Joeteck]

Raptor X's can only do 150MB/s, the NVRAID can do upto 300MB/s. You don't have to worry about saturating the buss... even if you have four of them...

On a side note: I have the eVGA 680i SLI board. I have 4 x 250 gig seagates in RAID 0. For me to hit about 280MB/s I have to disable write back cache and NCQ and set my block size to 16k. I just bought a Gigabyte board model GA-P35-DS3R to replace the eVGA I just got last week, which will do what we both want... and then some...

I did testing on an ICH7R with these seagates and got 486MB/s...... any questions??

[JamesXP]

Raptor X = Waste

Get the normal raptor or get a couple of The Seagate 250GB 7200.10

[bing]

Wellcome to OcF ! :welcome:

"Theoritically", four of those drives will not saturate your Sata interface at the south bridge, but its well known at many nVraid raid implementations, they are somehow "blocking" the true potential of Raid 0 transfer speed. Dunno why ?

Unless you're strictly on SLI, I suggest you migrate to Intel mobo cause currently their ICH9R is simply the best mobo raid, nVraid simply is beaten out of the water by a big margin. ;)

[aja]

Raptor X = Waste

Get the normal raptor or get a couple of The Seagate 250GB 7200.10

I would get four of them if I had the money and if the case could display them correctly...