Onboard Raid 5 VS 3-Ware PCI-E raid

Ok i am trying to decide whether or not i go with onboard raid 5 or add the new PCI Express 9650SE raid card from 3-ware. i will be doing a 4 drive raid 5 with 500GB seagate drives.

the array will store all my data, video files, music, pictures, and other things. i would like performance and reliability. the motherboard to be used is the ABIT IN9 32X-MAX with the Nvidia 680I Chipset.

What do you think? should i spend the extra 300 Bucks for the nice raid card or just go onboard?

Also i will be using vista ultimate 64 bit and the drivers are in beta stage now.

Is this local access? Or a file server accessed over the network?

How fast do want it to be? Just fast enough to stream music and videos? Or are you going to be always copying gigabytes of stuff on and off of it?

For 1.5TB, the safest and fastest route would be to use four 750GB drives in RAID 10 on a southbridge controller.

I also wanted RAID-5. I chose an Areca 1210 PCI-e card. So far, it has fit the bill for what I wanted. 4x 320Gig drives @ $95 ea + $320 for the card = $700 for a 960GB RAID-5 array with speedy reads/writes (Reads in the 200MB/s, and Writes in the 175MB/s sustained). I no longer worry about weekly backups (more like monthly, or bi-monthly backups).

JCLW's RAID-10 reccomendation is also a good one IMO.

Apparently, Intel's Matrix RAID is also seeing impressive RAID-5 performance (not quite as fast as a dedicated XOR card, but not too shabby for free )

I prefer to have seperate OS and DATA arrays on seperate physical drives, so doing the Matrix RAID-5 + RAID-0 on the same set of HD's was not an option for me. I still run RAID-0 on the Southbridge soely for OS Duties, and leave the RAID-5 completely seperate just for Data... I'm weird like that...

ITs going to be local access for this machine and then the network of computers will be accessing info from it and most likely streaming high quality vids from it.

the 3ware would potently offer grater redundancy with raid 6 supported by the twin XORs this would allow 2 drive failures in one set to be recovered from.

Randyman nice raid 5 writes, 87%+ efficiency

Or this smoking deal of a non XOR card but still good performance. They also make it in a x4 slot if you want, but even Randyman's array can't exceed the 250MB/sec. that the x1 provides.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816115029

Here is my little write-up of the one I got using 3x160GB Seagate HDD's
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=498499&highlight=RAID+5SS Linky

Thanks aftermath! I am pretty proud of it I successfully swapped ("transplanted") the RAID-5 to my C2D system, and it worked flawlessly on the first try . I love Slipstreaming Drivers

Yeah - I know the "PCIe 8X" feature of the Areca/3-Ware cards is not really an advantage over a PCIe 1x slot (I can actually hit Reads in the 250MB/s range on larger files IIRC) - but the more expensive cards do have an onboard CPU and RAM, thus they are capable of far higher bandwidths than a RAID card that still relies on the Host CPU for its XOR calculations (like the Highpoint, and most any card below $300).

TBH, you could almost match the performance of that card with Matrix RAID-5 on the Southbridge. Exactly why I went to "The next level", and I don't regret it. I could have spent 2x as much on a "Server" type RAID card, but you get greatly diminishing returns IMO. The Areca was already overkill (just like I like it ). I like to use my CPU for CPU tasks (mainly as a Digital Audio Workstation), not for RAID-5 Parity XOR calculations

The new 3-Ware cards use a PCI-E x4 slot so its not really overkill. the 4 portcard im lookin at has 256MB ddr-II ECC Ram onboard with a RISC processor too. there will be no going to the cpu to do any calculations on this puppy. and its only around 300 bucks or so.

Just remember, If you have a MB failure with Matrix raid, what happens to your array. If you have a MB failure with a raid card, you just swap out the raid card and your good to go.

stunt said:

Just remember, If you have a MB failure with Matrix raid, what happens to your array. If you have a MB failure with a raid card, you just swap out the raid card and your good to go.

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Precisely Stunt, that is why I went with the highpoint card.

Also let's be real, when you are using your RAID 5 so heavily that it needs CPU how much of a dual-core OCed A64 or C2D are you really using? 1%-5% of 1 core? Or is it more? Even if it was 20% of 1 core who cares, we have so many CPU cycles to spare these days it's ridiculous.

Travis

Travis Dawes said:

Even if it was 20% of 1 core who cares, we have so many CPU cycles to spare these days it's ridiculous.

Travis

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Not when you are gaming every cycle counts.

But when you are gaming you are not doing 150-250MB/sec transfers either. And when you are, it is a map change and you have CPU cycles to spare.

I use my PC's as a Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs). This means lots of CPU useage and constant HD access simultaneously (along with lots of PCI bus bandwidth when recording 24 tracks of 44.1K/24 and bussing out 5 stereo mixes while tracking). My PC's get hammered from all ends

NTM, I like the 256MB of DDR333 cache . Having the Southbridge SATA ports open for whatever is also nice.

XOR might be overkill for a desktop, but that's how I roll