Most reliable/Fastest RAID solution for RAID10?

Messiah Khan · 3 Dec 2012 at 13:03

So I'm in the process of building a new rig, mostly for use as a Photoshop/Lightroom/3D Studio Max workstation. OS/Application storage will be taken care with a 128GB SSD. For the rest of my storage (Other apps, photos, videos etc) I am going to be running 4x 1TB 7200rpm drives. Ideally I want to try and increase performance as much as possible, but I also don't want to risk loosing everything if a drive fails with RAID0. So I was thinking of going with RAID10 (2TB of storage would be more than enough for me, as long term storage is taken care of with a large, but slow NAS).

Everything is connected to a Asus P8P67 PRO motherboard. I could hook the drives up straight tot he motherboard as it has;

Intel® P67(B3) chipset :
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), gray
4 x SATA 3Gb/s port(s), blue
Support Raid 0, 1, 5, 10

Marvell® PCIe 9120 controller : *2
2 x SATA 6Gb/s port(s), navy blue

Or I could get separate RAID card. Would I see much performance benefit from getting a dedicated card if I'm only going RAID10 and not a RAID level that requires parity calculations? What happens if the motherboard fails, or I swap the board out later, can I simply transfer the array or would I suffer data loss?

If a separate controller card is better, what are my options? Ideally I wouldn't want to be spending any more than £150. I would want 4 ports (ideally 1xSAS with 8087 breakout) PCI-E x2 or better, and supporting RAID10. Any suggestions?

bremen1874 · 3 Dec 2012 at 13:39

I'd stick them on the four blue sata2 ports. As you say there's no parity overhead to worry about so an expensive RAID adapter isn't going to gain you much.

Historically it has been possible to move RAID arrays to new motherboards (assuming Intel to Intel).

rpstewart · 3 Dec 2012 at 13:48

As above for the RAID really but I'd suggest thinking about a bigger SSD. Lightroom in particular really benefits from having the database and thumbnails on an SSD but if you've got a big library then 128gb might get tight quickly.

FreeStream · 3 Dec 2012 at 13:54

rpstewart said:
As above for the RAID really but I'd suggest thinking about a bigger SSD. Lightroom in particular really benefits from having the database and thumbnails on an SSD but if you've got a big library then 128gb might get tight quickly.

This.

My 100,000 photo library is about 100Gb (1TB raw) in size with high quality previews.

Lightroom benefits even more if the RAWs are also on an SSD, which is irritating.