Motherboard with RAID 5 support?

[Clob]

Howdy fellas... Right now I have a 965p DS3 re 3.3 and its a fantastic board. Runs my E6400 @ 3.4 just fine.

For some strange reason, all my SATA ports (two controllers) died on the board and I have 4 drives stranded. This also made me realise that I could put all those drives to use. I'm looking for a board that supports RAID 5 and will OC just like my DS3.

Or, would a cheaper option be to find an adapter that have at least 4 ports and runs RAID 5 on PCI-E 1x?

Or is it a good idea to upgrade MB, get SLI 8800GT and PCIE 2.0 and RAID 5 onboard the MB? Or does one exist?

Thanks

 

[chookman]

Seems like you in a few different minds here... i think you need to ask yourself what you want it for?

What are you using the machine for and what will you want it used for down the track?

What are all the details of your current setup also for us to give you a clear path.

 

[Clob]

I have 4 Seagate 320gb 7200.10 drives. All SATA.

I use this machine for everything. HTPC, File server, Gaming machine. Tons of downloads. Making and decompressing rars. I use a lot of diskspace, and i figured RAID 5 will give me speed plus parity.

I have a E6400 2x1gb of Gskill DDR2800 4x4x4x12. X1900XT (soon to be an 8800gt, possible SLI or XF down the road.

 

[chookman]

I have 4 Seagate 320gb 7200.10 drives. All SATA.

I use this machine for everything. HTPC, File server, Gaming machine. Tons of downloads. Making and decompressing rars. I use a lot of diskspace, and i figured RAID 5 will give me speed plus parity.

I have a E6400 2x1gb of Gskill DDR2800 4x4x4x12. X1900XT (soon to be an 8800gt, possible SLI or XF down the road.

If you want SLI with your 8800GT your only real option atm is the 680i chipset... something like this: Or you could wait for the 7xx series from NVIDIA (next year?)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131073

Crossfire id go with P35 or x38 depends on budget mostly x38 vanilla for ~230 P35 board for ~140 for RAID features. note you wont be running SLI on these.

I hope you also realise to create the RAID5 array you will need to wipe all 4 drives so you will need to backup what is on them first. And dont even think about tring to migrate existing arrays as most times it just wont get detected.

 

[amnotanoobie]

Or, would a cheaper option be to find an adapter that have at least 4 ports and runs RAID 5 on PCI-E 1x?

A Sata PCI-E RAID-5 card would probably cost you more than your CPU.

Or is it a good idea to upgrade MB, get SLI 8800GT and PCIE 2.0 and RAID 5 onboard the MB? Or does one exist?

I know of no SLi board that has PCI-E 2.0 slots. Raid 5 is pretty common with high-end boards, though I don't know if it is hardware or software managed.

Thanks

You're welcome.

 

[chookman]

A Sata PCI-E RAID-5 card would probably cost you more than your CPU.



I know of no SLi board that has PCI-E 2.0 slots. Raid 5 is pretty common with high-end boards, though I don't know if it is hardware or software managed.




You're welcome.

Nice 4 port RAID card $300 so your right there with the CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816103050

Correct there are currently no motherboards with PCI-e2.0 that support SLI. NVIDIA's 7xx chipset range will solve this.

They are all hardware managed... software is done through OS's. Although these hardware onboard offerings use cpu time to do calculations, whereas a proper controller (the adaptec i mentioned above) have there own XOR processors and do the calculations onboard.

 

[Clob]

Errr... How well does Windows Software RAID work? Lots of CPU overhead? The only times im useing the HDD's to the extent I would be worried about performance is when I'm RAR'ing stuff.

Dualcore @ 3.4 should be able to handle that fine eh?

 

[chookman]

I think RAID-5 is only supported in Server editions.

Your best and cheapest option is to go with the onboard controller.

 

[Clob]

BOOOOOOOO! Meh. Thanks anyways... Aww poo... Cant have what I want and not pay for it... Damn my greedyness!