RAID5 on A8N-SLI Deluxe : is it hard Raid5

[Toto]

Newbie as I am, I can't decide, after reading the manual of the A8N-SLI
Deluxe, whether the RAID 5 is hard or only soft RAid 5 (they just say that
it 'needs a soft patch').
And if it's only a soft Raid 5, can someone tell if it's really bad (huge
CPU ressources needs, slow performances ???). Does this have any interest,
compared to structly soft RAid 5 solutions (with XP)

TIA

 

[Paul]

Newbie as I am, I can't decide, after reading the manual of the A8N-SLI
Deluxe, whether the RAID 5 is hard or only soft RAid 5 (they just say that
it 'needs a soft patch').
And if it's only a soft Raid 5, can someone tell if it's really bad (huge
CPU ressources needs, slow performances ???). Does this have any interest,
compared to structly soft RAid 5 solutions (with XP)

TIA

This thread should answer the question. Its slow...

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=377238&highlight=a8n-sli+raid5

This thread also mentions some problems getting the SIL3114 to handle
disks individually. It seems the vanilla IDE driver would not install.
The Asus FAQ suggest JBOD as a way to set up the disk, and use of
a RAID driver.

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=390717&highlight=a8n-sli+raid5

As for how to build a RAID 5, this is how you build a RAID 5:

1) A8N-SLI Deluxe
2) Install BIOS 1013 - release notes say:

"Fixed system cannot detect ARC 12xx Serial ATA RAID Host adapter."
3) Buy a member of the ARC 12xx family (ARC1220 $695)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816131004

4) Place the controller in the second big PCI Express slot. I.e. A
PCI Express x8 card will fit in an x16 slot.
5) Connect up to eight SATA disks to the controller. Make
some of them the array, and have room for a spare or two.

No motherboard RAID chip is going to have hardware XOR.
You would be quite disappointed with the results of a softRAID.

The best configuration on motherboards, is RAID 0+1, which
is two striped arrays that mirror one another. That gives
both speed and reliability.

To see what an ARC1220 can do, take a look at the picture
at the bottom of this page:

http://www.datamine.tk/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=461&PN=1&TPN=2

The speed is 350MB/sec read speed, and the config is:

Areca 1220, PCI-Express, 2 x Xeon 3.0 Ghz, 8 x 74 Gb Raptors, RAID 5
(July23/2005).

You will not match that with any motherboard RAID chip.

In that configuration, you don't have to buy Raptors, as cheaper
disks will still give awesome performance. The real benefit of
the Raptors in that example, would be seek rate.

Paul

 

[Leadfoot]

Newbie as I am, I can't decide, after reading the manual of the A8N-SLI
Deluxe, whether the RAID 5 is hard or only soft RAid 5 (they just say that
it 'needs a soft patch').
And if it's only a soft Raid 5, can someone tell if it's really bad (huge
CPU ressources needs, slow performances ???). Does this have any interest,
compared to structly soft RAid 5 solutions (with XP)

I'm running sataraid5 I beleive it is S/W as you need to install the raid
driver/software on the CD or D/L the latest off the ASUS website, my cpu
usage is 1% for everything running at idle, transferring a DVD file from a
drive on si3114 to a drive on the Nvidia takes the cpu usage to 14% and
takes about 3 minutes for 4.7GB



If you have questions about using individual sata drives see this thread
below

"A8N-SLI Deluxe : using SATA_RAID connectors just for extra SATA drives (not
RAID)"

I certainly wouldn't spend 700$ on a addon raid controller until I tried the
one on the motherboard first

 

[Robert Hancock]

Newbie as I am, I can't decide, after reading the manual of the A8N-SLI
Deluxe, whether the RAID 5 is hard or only soft RAid 5 (they just say that
it 'needs a soft patch').
And if it's only a soft Raid 5, can someone tell if it's really bad (huge
CPU ressources needs, slow performances ???). Does this have any interest,
compared to structly soft RAid 5 solutions (with XP)

It is software RAID, as with any RAID options on the Silicon Image or
the NVIDIA "RAID controller". The software RAID 5 in WinXP may even be
faster..

 

[J&SB]

If you want serious RAID performance, my advice is to buy a good RAID
controller card and have a dedicated chip do the XOR. I bought a 3-port
NetCell card, which runs what amounts to being RAID-3 (it's called the
proprietary name "RAID-XL" by NetCell) - striping with parity. I'm using
three 160GB Seagate SATA NCQ drives, giving me a fast 320GB with full
hot-swap redundancy. The included software monitors the health of each
physical drive at a user-set polling period (1-3600 seconds). If any one
drive fails the array transitions to RAID-0 until you replace the failed
drive, after which you can rebuild the array while still using your rig to
run other applications. They also have a 5-port card, if you're so
inclined.

 

[J&SB]

Here are some Sandra 2005 benchmarks corresponding to my last post:

A8N-SLI Deluxe / FX-55 / 2GB RAM
Drive Total Size : 298GB
Test File Size : 2GB

Buffered Read : 105 MB/s
Sequential Read : 103 MB/s
Random Read : 41 MB/s
Buffered Write : 104 MB/s
Sequential Write : 98 MB/s
Random Write : 24 MB/s
Average Access Time : 15 ms (estimated)

 

[Leif Nordmand Andersen]

Hi Toto,

Newbie as I am, I can't decide, after reading the manual of the A8N-SLI
Deluxe, whether the RAID 5 is hard or only soft RAid 5 (they just say that
it 'needs a soft patch').
And if it's only a soft Raid 5, can someone tell if it's really bad (huge
CPU ressources needs, slow performances ???). Does this have any interest,
compared to structly soft RAid 5 solutions (with XP)

Someone else actually refered you to this link:

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=390717&highlight=a8n-sli+raid5

I'm the authour of the link. The inbuild Nvidia contoller DOES infact
work. In my case it was Maxtor disks, which showed to be the fault. I
still can't (and have in fact given up to try to make the SIL 3114
controller to work)

I'm running a soft raid 5 in windows XP, I don't use the onboard Raid
5, but have 'hacked' Windows XP to run a soft raid 5 in windows XP.

I have 6x250 GB disks running the raid, 4 disks on a Promise TX SATA
controller and two disks now on the Nvidia inbuild sata controller.

Yet another 250 GB backup disk (Acronis secure zone) is also installed
on the Nvidia inbuild controller.

This raid 5 cannot run the system .... as it needs the system to
initialize .... my system is on a 160 GB IDE drive.

As for speed ... on a normal basis it takes no processor time. When I
copy it's seems to be about 40% of the speed of a single SATA drive,
though I've never bencmarked it. But for fileserver it's just fine.

Regards Leif.

 

[Toto]

If you want serious RAID performance, my advice is to buy a good RAID
controller card and have a dedicated chip do the XOR.

But if my pupose is only to build this Raid5 on a "home office" file
server, connected to the 5 other computers thru 100BaseT (mainly to stock
audio MP3 files, jpeg picures, Mpeg4 videos) will I see the difference
between this "good Raid controller card" and the Soft RAid 5 of the A8N-SLI
Deluxe ?