ICH8R Question

[Sleepy_Steve]

I'm planning on running a 4x500gb raid array on my main rig on the motherboard's ICH8R southbridge.

And while I'm happy with the intel matrix raid on the two raid 1's I'm running right now, I don't know if they gave it a hardware XOR chip or whatever it is to facilitate raid 5 operations. I'm guessing that it doesnt have a hardware XOR chip, is that right?

Second question, is how much of a PITA will a de-frag be of a 4x500gb RAID 5 array be? Assume its at least got 1tb of data in it for the de-frag.


Oh snap, got another question... Can matrix raid make a raid 5 out of dissimialr sized drives? Like 160gb out of a 160gb and 160gb out of two 500gb drives and a raid 0 on whats left of the 500's? I remember it having some very versatile features, but this idea seems a little too far out in left field to actually be workable.

[chawks2]

I dont believe the onboard ICH8 has an XOR, but not 100% positive.

Defragging should not be an issue, I believe this depends on defragmentation level and software used. My RAID 5 on ICH9 is mainly used as a data repository and not much data is moved around, generally it takes Udefrag approximately 5 minutes.

Your surmise is correct about the 160G drives and using them in conjunction with the 500G'r. The RAID set can only be created as the size of your smallest HDD. So, in your case your 500G would only be using 160G. RAID is based on physical disks, thus you would not be able to use left over unused data for an additional RAID set. Good luck!

[tuskenraider]

I'm planning on running a 4x500gb raid array on my main rig on the motherboard's ICH8R southbridge.

And while I'm happy with the intel matrix raid on the two raid 1's I'm running right now, I don't know if they gave it a hardware XOR chip or whatever it is to facilitate raid 5 operations. I'm guessing that it doesnt have a hardware XOR chip, is that right? Correct.

Second question, is how much of a PITA will a de-frag be of a 4x500gb RAID 5 array be? Assume its at least got 1tb of data in it for the de-frag. It'll take a little time.


Oh snap, got another question... Can matrix raid make a raid 5 out of dissimialr sized drives? Like 160gb out of a 160gb and 160gb out of two 500gb drives and a raid 0 on whats left of the 500's? I remember it having some very versatile features, but this idea seems a little too far out in left field to actually be workable. Not gonna happen, you'll lose everything beyond 160GB on the bigger drives.

[jason4207]

RAID5 on Intel is a PITA on an OC'd rig. If you have any kind of BSOD, or lock-up the RAID will have to rebuild and verify, and this can be a very lengthy process. This constant rebuilding puts more wear and tear on the drives, and the frequency that it happens makes it more likely that another drive will experience an error during the rebuild.

I currently use RAID10, and still have a lot of rebuilding going on, but it's not nearly as bad as far as as RAID5.

I'm moving my storage to an unRAID file server, and I'm just going to run 1 velociraptor in my main gaming/high performance rig. UnRAID has similar storage efficiency to RAID5 w/ n-1, but is more fault tolerant.

Go ahead and do the Intel RAID5 if you want, but in my experience it wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be.

[Sleepy_Steve]

Rig runs at stock speeds and is not OC'd.

would this reduce the frequency of rebuilding going on? Right now its running two raid 1 arrays just fine, and on older chipsets (ICH5R) I ran a raid 0 for the past 4 years without ever having any issues at all.

[jason4207]

Rig runs at stock speeds and is not OC'd.

would this reduce the frequency of rebuilding going on? Right now its running two raid 1 arrays just fine, and on older chipsets (ICH5R) I ran a raid 0 for the past 4 years without ever having any issues at all.

Yes it will reduce the frequency of rebuilds if you don't OC, and especially if you don't game on that PC. Any kind of instant power-off may invoke it, though....like a power outage if you have no UPS.

I ran RAID0 for years as well, and then finally had an incident. Then i had another not too long after that. Luckily, I had all my data backed-up on the other PC. The trouble I had to go through just doesn't seem worth it to me now.

[madhatter256]

Yep. Intel Matrix RAID using RAID 5 or 10 is not worth it if you really need it.

[Sleepy_Steve]

Then what about PCI expnasion cards for running drives?

How much are SATA raid cards w/ hardware XOR chips on them? More than I want to spend I'm sure.

[Madwand]

I've been running RAID 5 on ICH8x for several months without a single rebuild. Complaining about stability on an OC'd machine is a bit silly.

You have another option without changing the hardware or the OS -- using Ciprico's software RAID, which is an evolution of Broadcom's RAIDCore.

[jason4207]

I've been running RAID 5 on ICH8x for several months without a single rebuild. Complaining about stability on an OC'd machine is a bit silly.

You have another option without changing the hardware or the OS -- using Ciprico's software RAID, which is an evolution of Broadcom's RAIDCore.

This is OCers.com, so I figured mentioning that he may have troubles if he has an OC'd PC would be relevant. Other things like drivers can cause instability as well. Just b/c you don't have any problems doesn't mean that others haven't had issues w/ Intel RAID. It only takes 1 issue for someone to go from loving Intel RAID to avoiding it like the plague. I ran Intel RAID0 for years w/o issues, and then finally something happened. My quest for faster HDD speed, and then speed & redundancy has been fraught w/ decent highs and perilous lows. I just hope that you're not totally dependent on that Intel RAID5 array for your data redundancy.

Why trade Intel's software RAID for a 3rd party software RAID? Are there advantages?

[Madwand]

Why trade Intel's software RAID for a 3rd party software RAID? Are there advantages?

Intel's RAID is a pretty decent implementation, which can perform better than some hardware implementations, but isn't intended to be full-featured. It has had significant limitations when it comes to expansion for example, something which could have been well-addressed for little cost with the rich feature set and decent performance of a Ciprico addition.

However, I've just noticed that Ciprico's in financial trouble, so most people would choose to avoid it (although some may choose to grab it while it's still available).