[SOLVED] RAID performance

[Haywardi]

Dear Community,

I am looking for some advise. One of the PCs I use is beginning to get a bit old and I have started pondering upgrading it. However, it runs my storage subsystem on an aging Adaptec 5805 RAID controller (currently 4 WD 2tb drives on RAID 5, plus a hot spare). I really can't remember when I bought it but I am guessing over 10 years ago. In its day it was head and shoulders above what was offer by motherboard RAID controllers.

However, is that true today? Would I be better off ditching the 5805 when I upgrade and using onboard raid controllers?

Thanks in advance.
Iain

 

[gasaraki]

Onboard controllers would probably not do what you have configured now. Onboard controllers can't do hot spares and the max is probably 4 drives in raid 5.

 

[popatim]

The 5805, while old is still a decent controller but it will show it's age with more modern (ie - faster) drives attached that can exceed 200MB/s.

Personally, I would still use it. It's reliable and still fast enough. You can top out in the 700MB/s range when properly configured iirc. You also probably should have a small fan pointing at the cards heatsink as well; these are designed to be in a rack servers chassis which has front to back cooling and your PC may not be giving it enough airflow. .

 

[Haywardi]

Thank you for your thoughts, I will keep it and plan the upgrade around it.

 

[popatim]

Do you have a spare card should it fail or a backup of the data on the array?

 

[Haywardi]

Hi, both. I use Google cloud for backups and I have a spare card

 

[popatim]

Awesome!!!