Enough Bandwidth?

[The Halk]

I have a PCI-E 1x SATA RAID card in. And I'm thinking of doing a hard drive upgrade.

I run a 150GB Raptor as my main drive, and this will remain as it is. I don't want RAID on the boot drive.

However, a huge bottleneck on the PC is hard drive access when it's working with huge (GBs in size) files.

So I wouldn't mind having RAID0 on the new drives.

I'm thinking 2 TB should be enough, so I'm looking at 2 of the new 1TB Hitachi drives.

Will the bandwidth on a PCI-E 1x card be enough to handle RAID0 on two of these?

Previously I've had problems with corruption in RAID using nForce4, so I don't want to use the RAID on the motherboard, in addition as long as I keep the card then it doesn't matter if I upgrade the motherboard, the array will stay in tact.

 

[Pint]

1 lane is 2.5 Gbps in both directions, or 312.5 MB/s.
SATA2 is 300MB/s however in real world performance 2 of the 7K1000's in RAID 0 has been tested here http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2969&p=4
Maximum transfer rate is 117MB/s leaving plenty of overhead there before you hit that ceiling.
You could stripe 4 of them and still be safe with a x1 card.

I've just ordered my LSI 8708 Megaraid SAS controller, gonna stripe a pair of Fujitsu max 73GB 15K SAS drives. I'm gonna see it fly

I'd be iffy about striping 2 TB of data though, one disk goes and bang, you've lost the lot. I'd add at least another 1TB and RAID5 it.
Even cheaper probably is to get 4 x Barracuda 500GB or 4x WD AAKS 500GB and make a RAID 5 array from that leaving you with 1.5TB and at least some redundancy.

 

[The Halk]

I'm trying to run my drives cooler, which means leaving a bit more space between them. I've got racking for 8 of them. I'd like to get rid of 6 of those and replace them with a couple of 1TB.

I realise I could lose everything if a drive fails. I can live with that though. Stuff can get backed up to DVD if I'm keeping it. I have a 20MB broadband connection and a Giganews subscription, so I do go through a lot of PAR repairs, and unRARs (of Linux distros of course. No piracy).

 

[Pint]

Pretty much the one of the reasons why I want to get a really fast drive setup.
The system partition will be the RAID 0 array and I'll also be doing downloads, repairs and unrar's on that.
Looks like other people with the e6600 are finding problems with the speed of quickpar though so I may or may not see too much of a difference.
I'd just use a stripe as a temp drive for downloads and any work that needs fast disk access and then move it over to storage when it's been completed.