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RAID 5 on Epox mobos!

B

BossBri

n00b
Joined
Mar 7, 2003
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Epox has released some RAID 5 drivers for two of their motherboards, the 8KDA3+ for socket 754 and the 4PDA5+ pentium 4. The article is up over at theInq:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=19474

I think this is HUGE! I've been wanting to play with RAID 5 for a long time, ever since I had a RAID 0 array go bad and completely trash my system. I crave the speed but can't stomach another array failure. It seems that RAID 5 might offer some of the speed of RAID 0, but without the concern that you effectively halve the life of your storage medium(2 HDDs = half the time until failure).

Of course, I've never actually had a RAID 5 to play with so I don't know if this is just a pipe dream. If anybody has either of these mobos, I'd love to see some benchmarks. Anybody willing to donate their time and hard drives to the advancement of knowledge? :D
 
One thing to keep in mind about RAID5 is that it uses one of your drives for parity. Meaning, if you have a drive failure, the parity drive is used to rebuild the array. Also, you will not be able to use this drive for data storage. So, in a RAID5 array, you will lose 1 drive of your total drives to parity. That's why in a RAID5 array it's wise to have more, as opposed to less, drives.

The good news is that it's still saving space over a RAID0+1 array.

I'd be interested to see the performance penalty of RAID5 running in software and without buffer RAM... At least this is a step in the right direction. I'd be much more inclined to run a RAID5 array with 4 drives than I ever would be to run a RAID0+1 array with 4 drives.
 
That's another draw to raid 5 for me. You get the security of 0+1, but you can do it with one fewer drives. Question is, can it be as fast?
 
The down side of this is that it will be a "software" RAID 5 as the motherboards do not have an XOR processor on them, so it will be up to the CPU to do this.

==>Lazn
 
My question is if they are adding this ability, can it be modified to work on non-Epox boards... I have four 40GB drives sitting with nothing better to do then this...
 
I suggest getting an independent RAID controller because, as mentioned above, it'll eat up your CPU cycles doing XOR calculations. It might not be noticeable, but I'm anal about stuff like that.
 
Software raid5 = bad idea. Spend the money on a decent raid5 controller like the offerings from Promise.

I'm currently running six 250GB drives (5 in array 1 as online spare) with a Promise SX6000 w/128MB. Speed is good, unless the array is synchronizing, in which case file access times are a little slower, but I'm still able to stream video from the drive, and download 2 or 3 torrents to the drive without a problem.
 
evilmicah said:
Software raid5 = bad idea. Spend the money on a decent raid5 controller like the offerings from Promise.

I'm currently running six 250GB drives (5 in array 1 as online spare) with a Promise SX6000 w/128MB. Speed is good, unless the array is synchronizing, in which case file access times are a little slower, but I'm still able to stream video from the drive, and download 2 or 3 torrents to the drive without a problem.
Click to expand...

True, but I generally lower my standards and use a free option. Can't beat the price. :p
 
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