Kilamon
Rated XXX
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 Posted: Thu, 22 Dec 2005 12:53:33 Post Subject: |
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No, look at the DFI page about the motherboard:
| Quote: | Serial ATA with RAID
# Four Serial ATA ports supported by the nForce4 chip
- SATA speed up to 3Gb/s
- RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1
- NVIDIA RAID allows RAID arrays spanning across Serial ATA and Parallel ATA
# Four Serial ATA ports supported by the Silicon Image Sil 3114 chip
- SATA speed up to 1.5Gb/s
- RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5 |
It clearly states RAID 5. I have the board at home and though I haven't bought the disks yet, I'm planning to run raid5 for my boot/main partition. In fact, once I'm ready to go to raid5, I'll only have 1 partition.
I have a whole room of servers running behind me with raid configurations and they're all doing raid1+0 (2 drives) and raid5 (3 or 4 drives). The raid0 is striping on a disk, no redundancy. the +1 here is mirroring, adding that level of redundancy that's required. It's 2 disks. I just fired up one of the server managers here to double check this. These are HP Itanium servers with HP wide ultra3 SCSI drives 10,000 RPM. Pretty speedy in their own right. On the raid0+1 arrays, I am achieving 133.2mb/s according to HDtach and 96.5mb/s on the raid5 array. This is pretty poor. ...
*wanders off* Ok.. found the problem  one of the DBAs changed the stripe size to 8kb. I'll report new tests next week when the drive finishes restriping to 64kb. hmm checking another server here, one sec...ftlog who changed the stripe sizes...Apparently my servers are all banged up. I'll get back to you with valid tests. 
Anyways, I know it's possible to get a 148mb/s out of raid5 on these HP stations. I'm looking over the graph data in HDTach and they have some WD drives in a Raid0 on the 3114 chip listing at 74.5mb/s (4x sata) and a raid5 ATA listing at 174.9mb/s so raid5 is definately the way to go, even in ATA. All you need to do is consider how the technology works and it's obvious.
I dunno though. It looks like this might be more of a YMMV thing. The thread at DFI seems to have some pretty widespread results.
You know, in retrospect, this guy might be better off just getting 4 hard drives and doing raid5 on a single partition. It's easier administratively and according to my research, it might even be twice the speed depending on the hard drives.
Ok, here's my final word, to Drew and everyone else:
Do what ever you want to do that feels right for you. It's pretty obvious that benchmarks from other systems will only take you so far. I know that the DFI SLi-DR will do all the raid you want/need so there's no requirement to get a special controller.
Here's a link to wikipedia on RAID. |
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