Intel ICH9R Southbridge or JMicron JMB363 for RAID1

[edgar]

Asus offers the choice of either Intel ICH9R Southbridge RAID or JMicron JMB363 RAID. Any thoughts on which would best suit my needs?

I am building a new Vista64bit computer based on the Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard. I have one Western Digital WD1600YS 160GB SATA3 drive with a 1GB partition (I think that will be used for the pagefile but am open to suggestions) and a second partion with the balance of the available storage as C: (other suggestions welcome!) I also have a Western Digital 1TB external eSATA drive which will operate as a system backup device.

I have two Western Digital WD7500AYYS 750GB SATA3 drives which I am thinking of using as a RAID1 array (data mirror). They are initialized but not formated yet. I will either format them as four partitions (mine:, audio:, video:, and compressedStuff: or four directories--whichever works best with raid; any suggestions?)

I posted this a week ago in the ASUS motherboard forum but got no replys--sorry for crossposting, but I would really like some help on this--I'm a RAID noob!

 

[UncleDave]

Here's what I would do:

Put the two WD in as RAID 1.
Have two partitions 745 and 5.
Put my page file on the 5 and everything else on the 745.

I will either format them as four partitions (mine:, audio:, video:, and compressedStuff: or four directories--whichever works best with raid; any suggestions?) Neither would make any difference under RAID 1.

Don't know which board would better suit your needs (besides not knowing what your needs are).

UD.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

I disagree with the conventional wisdom that a RAID 0
"doubles" the probability of an error: people who claim
that wisdom never seem to specify WHAT event(s)
are more "probable" as a result of selecting RAID 0
instead of non-RAID setups.

The event that is more probable in a RAID 0 configuration vs. a single-drive configuration is data loss due to hard drive failure.

I have taken statistics and decision theory all the way
thru Linear Programming at U.C. Irvine's former
Graduate School of Management.

Then you should inherently know that the RAID 0 configuration has the higher chance of data loss.

From statistics, the mathematical probability that
BOTH of those HDDs fail at exactly the same time
is the probability that one fails SQUARED
e.g. 0.001 x 0.001
(in other words, A VERY SMALL CHANCE!)

That computation does not equal the chance of data loss. Data loss occurs if either hard drive fails, not just when they both fail.

The JMicron controller is more efficient than
ICH9R, imho, as long as it's on the PCI-Express bus.

It is not. The JMicron controller is on either the PCIe bus (250MB/sec for 1x) or on the PCI bus (133MB/sec) depending on motherboard design, while the ICH9R is directly connected to the north bridge via the DMI 2GB/sec chipset interconnect.

P.S. Why do you type a return after each 1/2 a line of text? It makes your posts more difficult to read than if you would just let the forum software perform its own word wrap.

 

[TeraMedia]

edgar, something to think about: THG did a study on migrating a RAID array from one platform to another. With minor effort, they were able to migrate from ICH7R to ICH8R to ICH9R. The same cannot be said w.r.t. migrating to or from some other platforms. So by using the ICH9R controller, you may be giving yourself an easier migration path if your mobo fails, or you upgrade it, or you move the disks to a different machine.

I won't even touch what supremelaw wrote. Take that advice at your own risk and peril.

As for performance... neither is going to give you the best possible RAID-1 performance. That comes from a controller that will try to pull data off of both drives at the same time to speed up read operations. I don't believe ICH9R is that advanced yet, nor the JMicron controller, but I could be wrong.

 

[garberfc]

I have a brand new rig utilizing the ASUS P5E mobo as well. I'm trying to create two Raid-1 arrays and can't seem to get it working. I'm using the Intel ICH9R controller.

Sata1 - 74GB Raptor - System (C: ) drive
Sata2 - Optical drive
Sata3-6 500GB Seagate drives

I'm trying to configure Sata3 & 4 as a Raid-1 as well as Sata5 & 6 as a second Raid-1.

In the bios if I leave the SATA configuration as IDE I'm able to install XP 64 on C: and I can see the other 4 devices in the Windows drive manager as unallocated.

If in the bios I change the configuration to SATA and then save and exit I have the option of doing a Ctrl-I and configuring the 4 drives into the two Raid-1 arrays. But, when I exit from here and XP trys to start w/in a second I get a flash of BSOD and then the system restarts. If I update the bios Sata config back to IDE I can boot back into XP as before.

What gives? How do I configure Raid on this beast???

Frank

 

[TeraMedia]

garberfc, I'll take a guess that by configuring your BIOS to SATA, you are necessitating the use of the F6 driver install during O/S install. Your Raptor no longer looks like an IDE device to the O/S, so it doesn't know what to do anymore.

You could consider software (O/S) based RAID-1 for your 4 500 GB drives, or you could try reinstalling the O/S using F6 and the ICH9R RAID/AHCI drivers. A remote possibility is to set BIOS to IDE mode, launch, install the SATA drivers, and then switch BIOS to SATA mode. But even if you do that, I'm not sure that the Raptor disk will be properly configured for use as a drive in SATA mode so you might not be able to boot (without going back to IDE mode).

 

[garberfc]

garberfc, I'll take a guess that by configuring your BIOS to SATA, you are necessitating the use of the F6 driver install during O/S install. Your Raptor no longer looks like an IDE device to the O/S, so it doesn't know what to do anymore.

You could consider software (O/S) based RAID-1 for your 4 500 GB drives, or you could try reinstalling the O/S using F6 and the ICH9R RAID/AHCI drivers. A remote possibility is to set BIOS to IDE mode, launch, install the SATA drivers, and then switch BIOS to SATA mode. But even if you do that, I'm not sure that the Raptor disk will be properly configured for use as a drive in SATA mode so you might not be able to boot (without going back to IDE mode).

Thanks, I figured out the problem.

I had to set the bios to Sata prior to any install and leave it there, and supply the drivers at the F6 step.

In my thick head I was thinking that I needed the bios to be set to ide during the install so that the install software could see the disk that was not going to be part of the sata raid. Yes, the none raid disk is sata as well.

All set now...

Frank