Raid 0 benchmarks and is 4 drives 2much

[marcvi]

Yo,
I'm slighly adding on to my current system.

400W Sparkle Power supply
AMD 2400+ Athlon 266 bus
Epox KT600 Motherboard with Onboard Raid
1gig of DDR Ram
ATI 9700 Video
DVD-Burner
And Finally- 4 identical WD 40gig 8meg cache HD's
And another 80 gig Hard Drive

Now of course I'm not rich I'm just been obtaining this **** for awhile. Anyway. Is it retarded of me to Raid 0 these 4 hard drives. Can the cable itself even utilize that or am I going beyond what is allowable. Should I raid 5 everything. The 80 gig is by itselft and for important data storage, so I'm not freaked out if a hard drive fails. Also Can you post benchmarks of your current raid setup either RAID 0 or RAID 5 and either 2 harddrives or 3/4. Also do you think I'm killing my system with power......I have alot of drives running.

Later

[bassman]

If you're not freaked out about a drive failure, I'd either go for RAID 3 or 0+1.
Also do you think I'm killing my system with power......I have alot of drives running.
You should cool down the system, or better yet, cool the drives (http://www.bjorn3d.com/_preview.php?articleID=60).

[Midknyte]

What is the exact model of motherboard? I'm pretty sure you can't do a RAID5 array on that board. I haven't seen any motherboards with built-in IDE RAID5 capable chips.

if you do a RAID0 of the drives, you won't see enormous gains in performance unless you are using programs that use a lot of drive access. you are greatly increasing the chance of volume failure. remember that if one drive fails, you lose everything.

http://www.storagereview.com/php/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=SingleDriveVsRaid0&PHPSESSID=87f1173f86615e7873513a33598babcd

[marcvi]

Epox EP-8KRA2+ that's it i'm pretty sure that it has RAID 5 (I haven't gotten all the parts for this machine yet (in the mail) so I'm not betting any) but I think it's got it. hmmmmm...... 5 hard drives heat up the whole system that much huh. Please report benchmarks if you have a similar setup. Also is 4 drives too much or should I just use 3.

[bassman]

I didn't check it's capabilities!

[Disk11]

No, you can't do onboard RAID 5. Click (http://www.highpoint-tech.com/hpt372.htm)

Take a look at RAID 1+0 (2 mirror that are striped) since you have 4 drives.

[omendata]

IDE Radi doesnt generate a significant performance gain - waste of time - get SCSCI if you really want to see a performance gain - you have to remember the way scsi works against bad old slow ide transfer - especially when you have more than one drive on the same ribbon cable.

Scsi does it all on the one cable but with a totally different sync and data trasnfer mechanism.

I tried it on my Abit KT87A and got a poor max performance gain.

Check toms hardware site for a more detailed info.

http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20010906/raid-02.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20011023/raid-01.html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/storage/20020830/ide_raid2-05.html

[Midknyte]

Disk11, thanks for confirming my suspicions. There are only a few RAID5 ide controllers out there, but I haven't seen any built-in.

[Disk11]

NP midknyte. Imagine how much PCB space a onboard RAID 5 controller would need:eek: And what if you wanted to add a stick of memory to the card:eek: :eek: