RAID Card or Onboard

Danger Phoenix

Danger Phoenix

Danger Phoenix

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Joined
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I want to set up 4 x 3TB drives in RAID5 and was wondering if I should get a LSI MegaRaid card or use the onboard controller on the Asrock Extreme4 Gen3?

I will have a i7 running at almost 5GHz and 16GB of RAM, so software RAID processing shouldn't be an issue.
 
For RAID5, if you want good read/writes, you need a true hardware RAID card, ie. one with onboard processor/ram to do the parity calculations, if you don't need great read/write (esp write speeds), then just use the onboard Intel controller...
 
How good is good? I am getting 4 x 3TB Western Digital Green drives because I don't need the speed. Most of the array will be used for media storage. For speed (downloads etc) I have a separate 1TB Western Digital Black drive.

What sort of read/write speeds could I expect to the array?
 
5x F1 1TB in R5 using intel ports on Rampage 3 extreme
Untitled-7.jpg


5x F4EG 2TB in R5 using a software raidcard
Untitled-11.png
 
It is a hardware chip, basically if its hardware and has a decent amount of ram (cache for read aheads and writes etc) then it wont slow the drive down as much from the perfect 100% performance x number of drives.

Those screenshots show you speeds of my two raid 5 arrays using software, and you asked how good is good? That is how good software raid is. with a decent card id be looking at anything up to 50% more performance on the F1's on reads
 
Ahh Right. Now I see the difference. Do you think I would need that for a storage array with infrequent high speed requirements?

I'm trying to decide if I should spend £250 on a RAID card or not.
 
what do you mean by "high speed"? What constitutes high to you, since a single drive can give around 130-150 MB/s at best on large sequential files, and fsk all on 4kb files.

Unless you either need maximum speed, or battery backup, its not worth it imo. If your raiding purely to get a bit of protection from a drive failuer and to increase performance at the same time, just use onboard.

If the difference of 400mb/s and 600mb/s is really needed, then get a card, but basicaly nothing requires that bandwidth, its just useful to have if your frequently moving around files in the 100's of GiB or if you require it in a sever for multiple users etc.
 
If it's just for storing large files, aka media - and not for other stuff (you use a SSD / Single drive for Boot) - then Onboard RAID 5 is fine.

Workstation uses, the cheapest way is to mod a Dell server RAID card.
 
I have a SDD for programs and Windows, and a standalone drive for active downloads and music etc where there will be a lot of reading and writing. The RAID array will sometimes be used to image large hard drives where writing is important, and loading virtual machines, but that's nothing where high speeds is essential.
 
yea, onboard is fine for your uses, it is by no means slow, when i am transferring large data like movies from one drive to the other if its under a GB its instant, if its like 50GB I still get like 300mb/s sustained transfer so it doesnt take a long time to transfer anything except when I first built the arrays and had a few TB to move around which took a couple hours, rather than the day odd they took with a single drive
 
Other reason to get a good raid card instead of using the motherboard raid is if the motherboard fails and you can't get a replacement of the same model you may find your raided drives are useless and you loose all the data on them, also motherboard raid is good for non important stuff and to increase performance but will never be as fast as a true raid card too as a true raid card off loads all tasks away from the CPU, also like I said it really should not be used for important data, Raid card companies will look after you if your Raid card fails but motherboard companies will tell you to reformat and start again.
 
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