Raid or not raid?

[woel]

Hi!

I'm going to buy a abit kr7a morherboard. Should I buy the raid version or not? What's good with raid and what's not? I know the price is almost 50$ higher for the raid version. I don't know if I need it. And if I buy the raid version should I buy two 40GB harddisks instead of one 80GB?

Give me some suggestions. =)

/Leo

[Guru]

First do not buy an ABIT mobo I repeat DO NOT BUY AN ABIT!!!!!!!!!!! The raid feature is always nice but I recomend you to buy one that has the Promise chip (High-Point controllers can mess up your system eaven thou my setup is working fine!)!

The main thing you should consider if you are setting up a raid 0 array is that if one drive breaks you lose all your data!

[woel]

I think I skip the raid. Save some money. Can always buy I a better system when my education is over and I got a good job. =)
But why not buy abit????
Thought that the kr7a was an excellent motherboard?

/Leo

[GT98]

You might want to check out Viahardware.com and check out Paul's FAQ on the Abit KG7/KR7 Mobos. I have a KG7 and its running alright minus me not being able to run in ACPI mode in Windows XP do to an BIOS issue at this time.

Scott

[Duty]

Originally posted by woel
But why not buy abit????
Thought that the kr7a was an excellent motherboard?

/Leo

They (ABIT) have an agreement with High Point. The agreement allows them to have the bleeding edge controllers before the competition. But, High Point has proven to be a quantity not quality producer. For example, I have a BP6 motherboard with a ATA 66 controller card built on the motherboard. As of yet I have never seen any stability when connecting a hard drive to the ATA 66 controller. I know that others have had success, but I have not. Now, before you role your eyes and mumble newbe or some other quaint little snipe realize I was an enterprise level hardware tech before moving on to teaching. Also, this little MB is now sitting in a web development sandbox. It works well as long as you don’t add a hard drive to the ATA 66 controller (running server 2000 for 5 months, not 1 crash). I think its a QA problem or maybe the hard drive make/model. For what ever the reason, I have had minor luck with the High Point cards (on board or off) while the promise cards seem to be extremely reliable. I now use a Promise ATA 100 for video capture and it is flawless (so far).

I hope this helps...

Jeff

[Indiana]

If you want to do vid-capturing you should go for the RAID - an extra card would be the better solution, though - main advantage is you can keep the RAID when you change the mobo, not even a reformat needed. The onboard solutions are MUCH cheaper, however.

As for the highpoint vs promise issue: it seems general agreement that the promise is the better solution. That said, if you look a bit deeper, most people with Highpoint-problems have one of the older models (e.g. HPT368), the HPT370 and 372 seem better. I have the second Highpoint 370 based RAID and they're both working fine.

If you're not doing really large transfers usually you won't notice much difference between a RAID and a non-RAID system.

[Guru]

Originally posted by woel
I think I skip the raid. Save some money. Can always buy I a better system when my education is over and I got a good job. =)
But why not buy abit????
Thought that the kr7a was an excellent motherboard?

/Leo

When you have changed a couple of 100 Abit boards with blown caps (and yes the still use the same brand) you might start to understand why you should never buy an abit mobo! Plus the Abit only has a 1 year warranty so lets say a 1 1/2 from no when(if) the mobo brakes you will most likley be left with a cpu (and memory) that you can no longer find a mobo for!

[Dilitante1]

Hmmmmmmmmm

IDE RAID (0,1)blows.....period!

There are IDE RAID 5 controllers out there but they are pricey if I remember right. RAID5 is good for backup purposes/fault tolerance.(blow a drive and it all still works)

If you are worried about backing up your data, save the $$ and get a tape drive to save your data on......24 gig tape drives are reasonable cost-ways, and you can get the tapes under $5 USD if you shop around.


Any system I have built that had Highpoint controllers on it, had the controller disabled and I added a Promise card (under $15 usd) and had a rock solid system afterwards.

-Dil

[xortam]

I don't know why IDE RAID would blow except that you can only use a small number of drives and you can't use an external case. I've always used SCSI RAID myself. I agree that you should rely on backups for data security rather than redundancy except in the case where you're running mission critical applications (I doubt any of you have that need). Redundancy also isn't going to help you if you inadvertently corrupt your data, which will then be faithfully replicated. I run RAID 0 because I'm looking for the highest performance with the highest capacity.

[Ali]

RAID 1 does NOT suck. I had a good reason for it just this week in fact.

Our General Ledger runs on a RAID 1 mirror (Software, Win2K server), This week has been very hot, and one of the drives decided to turn off. The head accountant was in the GL and didnt even notice. My beeper went mad, and the file server started beeping, but nothing was lost. If I had been relying only on tape backups we would have lost 3-4 hours of data-entry, and the time taken to recover from tape (tape drives are SLOW!)

As it was, we carried on till the end of the day (with the case off the file server) and then I was here most of the night trying to work out why it happened. The drive si fine by the way, it must have a thermal cutout that isnt documented or something.

Raid 0 (stripe) is a bit of a waste, I have it at home, but just because I wanted to see how much faster it was than a single drive. Not realy worth it in my opinion.

I always keep my data on a RAID 1 array now, its costs a little more, but HDD are so cheap nowdays that it doesnt realy matter. I remember when a 850MB HDD cost >$1000

Ali

[Paddy]

I have 4 8GB SCSI drives striped togeather. Something happend during a reinstall and I managed to corrupt just about all of the array - Woohoo!

The adaptor was a freebie...

From the website it claims to support modes 0, 1, 0/1, 5, and 0/5. Which of these would give me the most data to play with, whilst still having a degree of redundancy?

[Paulr]

And what exactly is wrong with RAID 0+1?
This is the configuration I use for my 4x 60GB HD's.
They are on a Promise controller, so this configuration offers very similar performance to a standard RAID 0 stripe.
It has redundency, I can loose any 1 HD and most combinations of 2 HD's and still continue to use my PC without downtime.
If I loose the RAID controller, any Promise RAID controller will automatically see the data on these drives.
COnsidering my Promise IDE RAID controller cost me £80 and a RAID 5 IDE controller will set you back £300+ I'd say for most home/power users this is an ideal setup.

[Gurm]

The problem is that:

1. IDE RAID 0+1 (aka FastTrak 100) is only partially hardware accelerated - it takes as much or more CPU power as doing the same thing in software with the built-in functionality of Win2k/XP.

2. 0+1 is extremely wasteful. You only get half as much usable space as you put in. With RAID5 you get more on the order of 3/4 or even 4/5 of the space as usable.

- Gurm

[Dr Mordrid]

1. FACT: while RAID5 is more efficient space wise than RAID 0+1 it's also slower in throughput presuming the 0 is a striped set. In fact many multi-drive RAID 5's are often barely 1.5x as fast as a single drive.

Why?

a. I've tested both numerous times and those security and redundency features (parity writing) in RAID5 come at a cost: a loss of streaming performance.

Writing all that parity data takes time, especially in RAID5 where it's written to the data drives and not a separate parity drive as is done in RAID3.

b. from the standpoint of the CPU used by the card; the FT100 is running at system CPU speed while most RAID processors run as low as 8 mhz.

c. hardware RAID's use I20 drivers in order to offload the RAID from the CPU to the RAID processor. This is yet another software layer. I thought the idea of hardware RAID was to get rid of a software layer?

Hmmmm....

2. FACT: this stuff about high CPU utilizations is pure unadulterated BULL***T!!

I'm SO tired of hearing this tired old hack about high CPU utilizations because they use "software".

Fasttraks use a driver, fasttrak.sys, which is no different than atapi.sys (IDE CD-ROM's) or sfloppy.sys (floppy drive). Without such "software" nothing on the comptuer would work but the CPU and memory!!

Digit-Life did a rundown of RAID cards recently using the ZD benchmarks and reported these CPU utilizations for a 2 drive RAID0;

Promise TX4: 1.48%/1.72% (PCI/66 & PCI/33 slots, respectively)
Promise TX2: 2.10%
AMI HyperDisk: 3.7%
Adaptec 1200A: 14.4%

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/fttx4/tx4-wb.html

Also, De LAN Tech recently did a "RAID: fact or fiction?" article coving this issue in a Q & A format. I quote:

====
Q: Is IDE RAID inefficient and CPU intensive

A: Bull. Again, if properly configured, while CPU utilization may be slightly higher than a single drive in some cases, it is by no means a CPU hog.
====

I couldn't agree more. If you *really* want to hammer CPU utilization go after many of the sound cards on the market these days, especially Creatives.

3. PRICE: a Fasttrak TX4 can be had for $130 or so. A hardware RAID card runs $400 and up, mostly up.

Dr. Mordrid

[Sasq]

hmm speaking of ABIT and faulty caps, my SA6R went back on the weekend after 10 months of service due too.... leaky caps.

The raid array worked well on the board though, the only time it broke was due to my own stuff ups - also that box runs a linux server and MURC|BOT, not much else

Dan