Raid 1+0 / 5?!

[starshooter10]

hey guys i've been off of INAG for about 3/4 years but im back!!!

any-way i want to know what kind of proformance gains i would get from RAID 0 Vs. raid 5

i can't decide if i want to go raid 5 (what god will a 4th drive do)

or raid 1+0??


i need redundency but i'd like to get the MAX profromance for my 3d animation(lots swap activity) (among other things)

i've got the P5B-E MOBO it's got a controller but im not afraid to get a add in card if the benifits are worth it


-VAP

(currently have raid 1 with seagates 320GB NCQ 16MB SATA2)
and a pile of other drives lol (1x500GB 2x80GB 1x160)

i wanna toss the 80's and 160...

[cauzomb]

If you have a good controller you will get the best performance with raid 0 on PCI/IDE, generally the ide controllers have 2 channels, drives have trouble transferring with more than 1 drive on each cable so RAID 5 isn't that great. If you have Sata/Pata, they may be less limmited, if the board has independant channels on each plug and each channel isn't sharing time on the sata/pata controller/can handle full duplex raid, and you have enough sata/pata channels to use 4 or more drives you can use RAID 5. You will have a big advantage over ide raid 0 with either pata/sata raid 0 or 5, if you are using huge video/audio files, you need LOTS of ram, I'd max out the board if it supports it, bus throughput is important, you don't want drives fighting for time to transfer over the same bus. A stand alone decoder processing card to relieve the CPU of the video/audio decode job would be a big help too. You will get best performance with RAID 5 through a duplex SCSI card, meaning one or more drives can be writing while one or more other drives are reading "where you get this???" I dunno, it's just some ideal situation that may not exhist... Large cluster sizes help speed things up when using large files.

[starshooter10]

hopfully i'll end with 4x 320 SATA drives and a singe IDE 80 for a scratch drive

but i can't decide if i want a raid 1+0 or a raid 5 with a spare...

i want redundecy beacuse i CANNOT afford to loose my data and making DVD backups is no longer fesable. (40 disk every 3 days isn't cool =-P )

i do alot of work on my computer but i need the max proformance for my 3dsMAX and photo shop

would i get better I/O's from 0 or a 5?

i've got 3GB or ram with a core 2 duo...

all on a P5B-E

it's supposed to have a 6ch. SATA raid controller but i've never used it although im VERY good with raids

(10+ year tech)

[starshooter10]

i know my Co-workers say hardware raid is WAY better then Sofware raids..

but by software they say any on-board controllers

but it would seem to me that software raids would be VIA disk managment

so with that said on my P5B-E it's got the intels ICH8R so is that hardware of software?

[cauzomb]

i know my Co-workers say hardware raid is WAY better then Sofware raids..

but by software they say any on-board controllers

but it would seem to me that software raids would be VIA disk managment

so with that said on my P5B-E it's got the intels ICH8R so is that hardware of software?

I'm not familiar with the specifics of that chipset, but generally, if it does not have it's own processor, drive controller/cach memory and drive ports, it's software controlled via cpu process routines handed out by the chipset. I've seen real raid controllers that include 512 megs of que, the memory is a small portion of the card, there are big processor chips, drive controllers etc built right onto the card.. A not so conclusive way to test the quality of the raid controller is to monitor the amount of CPU usage with different controllers, if it uses less CPU, it's probly a better card but you will want to see which has greater throughput as well. A controller is considered software, like a winmodem when it's chipset hands out software jobs to the cpu, where the opperations of data splitting and drive access are handled by processes running in the CPU rather than on the raid controllers chipset. Other versions of sofware raid are like dynamic disk management in windows, where applications without special hardware conrol logical drives spanned across multiple physical disks.

[cauzomb]

f1 seems to be the resident expert on RAID configurations so you may want to wait for his responce before deciding, but your 10+ years of experience with this stuff will get you going towards your goal. F1 and others here suggested to me which size cluster to select for different purposes, such as with large files and large transferes to use large clusters, this lowers the drives file capacity slightly by increasing the amount of slack when smaller files are written. IE if a small file does not fill up the large cluster, the remaining empty space of the cluster is unavailable, if it's a 4K file, it will use the whole 64K cluster. The remainder of the cluster equals 60k of slack, this configuration is not recommended for gaming due to the large quantity of small texture files that need to be accessed frequenly, but recommended for a setup like yours.

[starshooter10]

yeah i'll start looking at my own raid controllers

i do a bit of 3D MAX

lots of CPU used so i don't want a RAID taking from my CPU

and that one IS a software raid (at least by comparison over a KNOWN hardware raid card i played with at work....)

now i need to fiure out if t's worth it...

because i only have PCI and PCI express 1x on my MOBO free

my vid card take the 16x slot....

i wonder what the max trasnfer of the southbridge it...

should i MAX a PCIX bus or use my CPU hmmm....

*1x cards are hard to find and-way