Gigabyte RAID 5 for storage, IDE for System

[cyclometric]

Hi,

Currently I have 3 WD Caviar Blue 500 GB hard drives, in IDE mode, plugged into 3 of the 6 orange SouthBridge SATA ports on my 790X-UD4P board. I am about to add a new WD Caviar Black 1TB drive on which I will install the OS (Vista64), along with another partition for storage, and then I will make a RAID 5 array of the 3 500GB disks.

My question is whether I would see any performance hit due to having all 4 drives controlled by the Southbridge? Would there be any benefit to plugging the system drive into the port of one controller, and using the other controller's ports for the RAID drives? This will be my first experience with RAID on a home computer, and I am confident in my abilities, and am just looking to maximize the data throughput between and among all the drives.

Thank you,

Will

 

[wathman]

I can't say for sure since I haven't built a setup exactly like yours, but I would think if you utilize both controllers to connect your drives, you can increase your operational throughput. Tom's just ran an article where they built two RAID arrays on two controllers with Intel SSDs just because they could and got some crazy fast throughput on that system. You might find a pointer or two that will be useful in the writeup.

 

[cyclometric]

I can't say for sure since I haven't built a setup exactly like yours, but I would think if you utilize both controllers to connect your drives, you can increase your operational throughput. Tom's just ran an article where they built two RAID arrays on two controllers with Intel SSDs just because they could and got some crazy fast throughput on that system. You might find a pointer or two that will be useful in the writeup.

Thanks, wathaman. I'll look for it and check out the info. Much obliged,