Quote:
Originally Posted by SretiCentV
I want to add a RAID 5 configuration to my computer for backups. I need to buy the card and 4 drives. My computer supports the following I/O:
Six total: Two 64bit/133MHz PCI-X® slots on a single PCI bus; one x8 PCI Express® slot;
three x4 (x8 connector) PCI Express slots
Amount of storage space is not that important but writing speed is. 800gb total ought to do it.
I want to spend between $500-1000 for everything.
If anyone knows a better forum for this, please advise also. Thanks in advance
I was disappointed in the speed gains RAID 5 offered. I installed an ARECA 1210 hardware controller and 4 WD5000YKS drives (500 GB each) for a 1.5 TB system.
It wasn't as fast as I'd hoped, because even with the hardware controller, parity calculations for the writing operation are slow. It reads fast... but it writes about on par with others.
If WRITE speed is what you want, you want RAID 0 (striped sets). If you want that PLUS redundancy, you want RAID 0+1 (two identical copies of a stripe set, in mirror). Note that this is different from RAID 1+0 (two mirrored drives, then striped).
In a stripe set (with no parity), write speed is a function of the number of drives. Your writes will be faster, the more drives you stripe. If you stripe two drives, you'll get some improvement. If you stripe 3, you'll get more. Then double the number of drives for the mirroring.
Thus, you could get an Areca 1210 (four ports) for about $350, and four 1 TB drives for about $100 each, and have decent throughput. Or, you can buy an Areca 1220 (8 ports) for slightly more ($450), get six drives, and increase the throughput somewhat with more drives in the stripe set, for just about $1,000.
That's wasted money, though. I wish I hadn't gone for such overkill.
Jester
