4 port Raid5 PCIe card

Soldato
Joined
11 Jun 2003
Posts
5,145
Location
Sheffield, UK
Does anyone know of a cheap 4 port PCIe Raid5 card. Id prefer a pseudo-hardware (for price reasons, with the calculations off-loaded to the processor). I could do raid5 software but im not too keen on the raid5 hacks for WinXP and most of the server-based O/S are a pain in the butt for normal use.
Machine is going to be a mix of a fileserver, VERY occasional guest use gaming machine and media box (though probably not using media centre edition).
Just a name to google for or a link to a manufact/OCuK approved review site will do nicely.
 
I've noticed one of the ASUS boards has raid 5 onboard - is it PCIe or still tied to PCI bus?

Edit: The write speed isnt THAT important - its going to be used as a dump area cos I cba to have piles of DVD-R's around the place. The read speed from most software raid5 seems to be on par or even better than hardware based controllers?
 
Last edited:
Reads will be max of 62Mb/s (or there abouts) per drive which will come to around 186Mb/s - so say around 120-140 real world maximum.
If I then want to shoot this data over the (gigabit) network this also has to use the PCI bus so im already at (over)double PCI total bandwidth. On top of this is general signalling + graphics so a decent box streaming is going to be using around 300Mb/s which is a fair chunk over PCI's available bandwidth?
Accepted for home use it may be a little excessive but want something everyone in the house can use excessively without it getting too choked up.
With a PCIe card being 250Mb/s each way and total bus bandwidth in the several Gb/s that pretty much leaves the network as the bottleneck.

I WOULD look at dedicated NAS storage box but trying to get the machine to a point where it can do several jobs as easier to warrent being left on.
 
Back
Top Bottom