XFX RAID3 card

MikeTimbers

MikeTimbers

MikeTimbers

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I've acquired a job lot of 80GB SATA drives but can't use them with my motherboard as it downclocks if more than a single drive is attached. Individual 80GB drives are too small anyways to really provide much these days so when I saw a PCI-based RAID3 card for under £20 new, I ordered one.

Supposedly these things mimic an Intel-standard IDE controller requiring no drivers. This also makes the array easily transportable. I plan on creating a 3-drive 150GB usable array for use in my NForce2-based system which is currently only using a 40GB IDE and in theory, I should be able to Ghost the current system onto the array and boot off it without needing to re-install.

Has anyone here used one of these things? Good/bad? Fast/Slow?
 
In theory these cards look pretty good (no drivers needed etc) but there are a few drawbacks.

1) It's PCI so the speed of the array is going to be limited to the 133Mb/s maximum available from the PCI bus. That bandwidth is also shared with any other PCI cards in the machine and any onboard devices (LAN etc) which the board manufacturer has decided to connect to the PCI bus. A 3 disk RAID3 array will have a read speed around that of a 2 disk RAID0 array so with half decent disks you'll be coming close to saturating the bus.

2) You'll be limited in terms of write speed. RAID3 stores all the parity on one drive so the best you can hope for is 50-70Mb/s depending on the drive. However you're going to be further limited by the rate at which that parity can be calcualted. As far as I'm aware these cards don't have any onboard parity engine so all the XOR calculations have to be done by the main CPU. Not only does this restrict the write speed to around 20Mb/s it also places a hefty load on the CPU for the duration of the writes.

That said the question now becomes is that going to be any worse than what you have now? Probably not much. The big problem with the slow writes is pagefile access but you could always move the pagefile onto the IDE drive or a mobo connected SATA drive to give you better writes.
 
i've got the 5port version, got it after seeing the review on the banned site too

think it was £45 i got it for (new!), have 3x 400gb drives attatched now, soon to be getting another 2 of them

performs well and as you'd expect, it just uses standard pci drivers, so you can install to it without any fuss at all (although i dont use mine for holding the os, only data)

works perfectly
 
the place i got it from has only got the 3 port in stock now (and has done since i got mine a few months ago!, think xfx have stopped making them)

a quick search showed they are still in stock in some places

the revo64 5 port that is
 
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