Raid 0 - Motherboard raid or external PCI express card raid?

crazyswede · 4 Mar 2008 at 23:26

I am thinking of creating a raid 0 setup with either 3 or 4 drives. Would you guys advice me to either use the raid built into the motherboards or buy a pci express raid card like this adaptec one?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CC-026-AD&groupid=701&catid=49&subcat=

What would give me the best performance?

Snapshot · 5 Mar 2008 at 07:07

Motherboard should be okay as it's only RAID5 where it's inferior to add-in cards. I would say though that using RAID0 with more than two drives seems somewhat risky unless your backup policy is spot-on.

crazyswede · 5 Mar 2008 at 09:57

It is going to be for work and I know it is going to be risky :eek:

I am trying to work with big files, e.g. 32gb files with over 500,000,000,000 soundings. I am trying to find the best way of doing it. If I go for the raid 0 then I will make an automatic backup every evening. Maybe I should look at SAS.

rpstewart · 5 Mar 2008 at 10:00

If you're looking at dealing with files of that size you need to seriously consider what is going to be done with them. If, for example, you're going to be reading and writing at the same time then you'd be better off with a pair of two disk arrays, one holding the file which is being read and one with the one which is being written to.

crazyswede · 5 Mar 2008 at 10:29

That file is the extreme at the moment. What I am working on now is a 8GB file with 150,000,000,000 soundings. The only time I am dealing with 2 files is when I am importing or exporting data, but what you said is interesting and I will experiment. The problem is when I am filtering the data in the file and to some extent when looking at the data in 3D. I have sent an email to the software people to see what they recommend.