Raid 1+0 / 5?!

[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.