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- Joined
- 17 Apr 2010
- Posts
- 461
Hi,
I have acquired 4 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives, that support the SATA II interface, so a little out of date for a gaming setup but my thoughts are as follows...
Redundancy does not concern me as I have an external 2TB USB HDD & 1TB NAS that I do regular backups on. Therefore I was thinking of putting the drives into a RAID 0 setup. I have read multiple reviews advising me that using an onborard controller with RAID 5 would actually negate benefits, and it's quite clear the SB850 controller on my motherboard is probably not up to the job (it does support RAID 0,1,5 and JBOD).
My motherboard only has 2 PCI-E slots on it, currently both in use for a Crossfire setup, so I am struggling to come up with an adequate solution of an add-on RAID controller (I do have a spare PCI-E 2.0 x1).
To be honest I am quite OK with the increased risk of running a RAID 0 setup, but in my testing on Win 7 x64 using HDTune I was only achieving a max throughput of 200MB/sec and burst of 70MB/sec, I can attach a screenshot later FYI. Prehaps this is an adequate speed, but I would have presumed 4 SATA II HDD's running in RAID 0 would be faster than this.
I guess what I am looking for is:-
Reassurance that 200MB/sec is actually a pretty good speed to be getting from this.
How much benefit could be obtained from using an add-on RAID Card.
What RAID cards would work with what slots I have left (and the material benefit) - 1x PCI-E 2.0 x1 slot, 2x PCI slot.
Thanks, Chris.
I have acquired 4 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM drives, that support the SATA II interface, so a little out of date for a gaming setup but my thoughts are as follows...
Redundancy does not concern me as I have an external 2TB USB HDD & 1TB NAS that I do regular backups on. Therefore I was thinking of putting the drives into a RAID 0 setup. I have read multiple reviews advising me that using an onborard controller with RAID 5 would actually negate benefits, and it's quite clear the SB850 controller on my motherboard is probably not up to the job (it does support RAID 0,1,5 and JBOD).
My motherboard only has 2 PCI-E slots on it, currently both in use for a Crossfire setup, so I am struggling to come up with an adequate solution of an add-on RAID controller (I do have a spare PCI-E 2.0 x1).
To be honest I am quite OK with the increased risk of running a RAID 0 setup, but in my testing on Win 7 x64 using HDTune I was only achieving a max throughput of 200MB/sec and burst of 70MB/sec, I can attach a screenshot later FYI. Prehaps this is an adequate speed, but I would have presumed 4 SATA II HDD's running in RAID 0 would be faster than this.
I guess what I am looking for is:-
Reassurance that 200MB/sec is actually a pretty good speed to be getting from this.
How much benefit could be obtained from using an add-on RAID Card.
What RAID cards would work with what slots I have left (and the material benefit) - 1x PCI-E 2.0 x1 slot, 2x PCI slot.
Thanks, Chris.
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