about to make the plunge / nforce sli raid-5 question

[allyn]

ok, i'm about a hairs breath away from switching away from xeon land over to one of these beauties. i have one thing holding me back, regarding the nforce raid-5 support:

 

the ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe supports raid-5 via the nforce4 sli, but for some odd reason, the specs of both the SLI-DR and the SLI-DR Expert only list raid-5 as being available under the Sil 3114 chip. This really makes no sense to me, because the 3114 connects via PCI only and would be way more bottlenecked in raid-5 than the nforcfe sli would be.

 

whats the real deal here with the raid-5 on the DFI boards? i was pretty sure that the raid-5 on the nforce4 sli chip was a standard thing, and am rather confused that its not listed on either of those spec sheets...

 

also, i read here at toms that the nforce raid-5 implementation is handled nicely through windows (they used the ASUS board to test it), but i havent been able to find what the silicon image chip offers as far as functionality from within windows.

 

thanks in advance for any responses here. i really like the DFI board over the ASUS board, except for this one (big) detractor, which is likely just not listed properly on the DFI specs. basically i just need verification of this either way.

[Angry_Games]

the new Asus board is a newer NF4 chipset that probably has native RAID5 support

 

the original NF4 chipsets did NOT have this ability, only the Si3114 had this ability, and if you look at the top sticky in teh Off Topic section, you will see that my best results in RAID5 were about 16MB/s reads/writes....very poor.

 

If you want RAID5, I would not even count on the Asus native....I would ALWAYS get a high dollar RAID pci/pci-e card that has it's own onboard controller and cache memory. There is no substitute for something like this...going integrated route is cheap and not even close in terms of performance.

 

Again, keep in mind, no matter how good you might see results on an integrated RAID5 solution, it cannot compare to a good pci/pci-e expansion card solution that has it's own controller/memory.

 

I've found zero use for RAID5, and even server/web admins that I talk to say that it is a useless feature for everyone except server/network admins who require it for their mission critical situations.

 

For the rest of us, RAID0 and RAID1 are preferred RAID methods.

 

If you must have RAID5, then I suggest you look elsewhere, into something other than an enthusiast board...more into a server board that can handle all of the mission critical applications you throw at it, and has ECC memory capabilities.

[allyn]

I've found zero use for RAID5, and even server/web admins that I talk to say that it is a useless feature for everyone except server/network admins who require it for their mission critical situations.

 

For the rest of us, RAID0 and RAID1 are preferred RAID methods.

 

my main reason for wanting raid-5 is getting the most available space while keeping the redundancy. if the speed isnt the best, thats ok (though 15 meg/sec is a little too slow), but my hope was to move away from saturating the crap out of the pci bus every time i move stuff to/from the array, which is why i was hoping to switch over to the nforce implementation.

 

i'm currently using a dedicated card (LSI 150-6 board), but for some reason i'm only getting 20 meg/sec sustained to/from it, which makes no sense at all because it has the hardware xor engine. at least the reads should be way faster, but no go. not sure of the cause, but i do know the LSI controller alone costs more than even the best DFI motherboard, so if i have to deal with marginal transfer rates, so be it, the upgrade will probably be worth it in the end. but i do know raid-5 on the nforce is way quicker than i'm getting with my current config.

 

the other thing i've considered is just doing raid-5 via windows, because this takes the controller requirement away. if the board fries, just connect the drives to another windows box with that many ports available and you're in business again with no lost data. toms showed this was possible.

 

also of note is that i use a raptor as my system drive, and the array is mainly for mass storage.

 

the new Asus board is a newer NF4 chipset that probably has native RAID5 support

 

if i understand it correctly after looking at this nforce4 breakdown, it seems the asus board has the SLI x16, where the DFI boards have the non-x16 SLI chip. most of the reviews just say "nforce sli" for both the ASUS and DFI boards, so thats what was throwing me off.

[Angry_Games]

unfortunately RAID5 is going to be a low-performing solution unless you have the very best hardware and drives...

 

best solution is to use RAID-0 on the NF4 controller for speed, with a RAID-1 mirror on teh Si3114 for backup redundancy