RAID advice required please

[vwgolfman]

I have been running RAID1 (mirroring) using 2 x 74Gb Western Digital 10,000 RPM Raptors for a few years now.
I am using the on-board RAID facility provided by the nForce4 chipset on my A8N SLI-Deluxe Motherboard (Asus).
Performance is excellent but I believe it's still a lot slower than running a single drive.

Soon I shall be upgrading my PC; purchasing a new Motherboard, CPU and RAM.

Again I would prefer to minimise my risk of data-loss.
Are there RAID options which return an equivalent speed to running a single drive?
What is RAID 1+0?
Which current Motherboard supports the best RAID configurations?
I can purchase a new drive or new drives if necessary.

Many thanks for any help and/or advice

 

[rpstewart]

Again I would prefer to minimise my risk of data-loss.

This is what backups are for. RAID only provides hardware redundancy.

Are there RAID options which return an equivalent speed to running a single drive?

No RAID level will give the speed equivalent to a single disk, it'll either be faster or slower depending on the RAID level and the controller used. For example RAID0 will be a fair bit quicker for both reads and writes, RAID5 will be quicker for reads but only quicker for writes if you use a decent controller card.

What is RAID 1+0?

Pretty much what it says on the tin, it's RAID1 arrays operating as part of an over-arching RAID0 array. In theory it can support the loss of half of the disks in the array without losing data.

Which current Motherboard supports the best RAID configurations?

Most current boards have some form of RAID controller onboard as part of the main chipset, the popular chipsets from Intel and Nvidia support RAID0,1,5 and 1+0. The RAID5 write performance tends to be poor though as none of the onboard solutions have dedicated parity engines.

 

[Imy]

Are there RAID options which return an equivalent speed to running a single drive?

This depends on your RAID controller. In theory the setup you have now should offer superior reads over a single disk setup, and only a slight performance hit on writes.

What is RAID 1+0?

A waste of money Its basically two mirrored sets in a striped set e.g. 2 x Raptor in RAID 1 striped with another 2 x Raptor in RAID 1. It requires a minimum of 4 hard disks to use and as with RAID 1, requires an even number of disks where the usable capacity is (size of smallest disk) / 2. Its a more complex setup than just simply using RAID 1 and the performance gains are not that great/useful in a typical desktop pc setup.

Which current Motherboard supports the best RAID configurations?

I would say any recent Intel based chipset should be fine.

I can purchase a new drive or new drives if necessary.

Get your new mobo/cpu/ram sorted first. Try out your existing setup on the new kit and if you're not happy, consider getting new drives.