Really big question

[Narion]

Got a system with 10 500GB HDDs, all connected up looking at having a RAID 1 Config with the OS disc and another disk to backup that, the looking to have 2 RAID 5 configs set up over the other 8 drives.

My Motherboard is a P5K Premium Wi-Fi/AP so that supports raid got a 4 port rocket raid card for 4 of the drives and was wondering if i'd be able to set up a RAID 5 with software?

or any other configuration of set ups?

thanks in advance

 

[rpstewart]

My initial feeling is that setup isn't going to be quick. Motherboard based RAID1 isn't great because it doesn't support split reads so it's not faster at reading than a single disk and writes are slowed by the need to verify that both disks have completed the operation. Similarly the RAID5 implementations lack hardware support for the XOR parity calculations and hence while reads are fine writes can be in the 15-20MB/s range. That's fine for mass storage but anything else will struggle. RAID5 is possible in software with Windows dynamic disks but you need one of the server versions (2K3 etc) to do it.

Without knowing more about what you plan to use the machine for it's difficult to say whether what you're proposing is the best use of the available hardware. Personally I don't see the point in RAID1 domestically for example, it has too many drawbacks and not enough advantages for my liking. RAID5 does have it's place, I use it simply so that I don't have to restore 1.5Tb of data from backups if a drive fails, however neither should be seen as a replacement for backups.