On Board RAID question...5 or 10?

I know I'm new to this forum, but I joined because of your question. I also have some insight on a 500gb drive I think you would be interested in.

BTW, you have a nice rig there.

My first question is, are you concerned with data recovery and backup? If so then go for the Raid 10. I really wouldn't recommend all that data only on a raid 0. You never know what could happen.

I do have some insight on a Samsung hard drive that I just bought. Its a brand new part from the company. If you check it out on Newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E1682..., you'll see that it gets some really great reviews. You will also read that the drive is slow and shouldn't be used for operating systems.

These statements are not indicative to the performance of the drive. I have benched the drive with a 210MB burst and a 67MB sustained read. That is some serious speed from one drive. The access times are great as well. The drive is also whisper quiet, I swear I can't hear it at all. The best part about the drive is that it is only $150 bucks. I love the drive so much I'm getting rid of my two 250gb Seagates for another.

I hope that helps you some. I'll let the raid guru's take over for the rest.

Not a chance that I will run RAID0. Perhaps RAID0+1, but never RAID0 with sensitive data. My primary goal is to get fast read & write times with redundancy. I know this can be obatined with RAID 5, but not certain how effective the onboard controller (ICH8) is. I'm hoping to hear that the CPU overhead needed for the XOR has been nullified by Dual Core. Anyone, anyone.....Bueller?

As for drive selection. I can't comment on the Samsung drives, because I don't have any experience with them. I do know that the WD drives that I will be using are specifically designed for RAID, have 5 year warrantys, are quiet, are relatively cool, and can be had for $150 with coupon code. The drives are considered Enterpise class by WD.

I'm running RAID 5 on a D955XBK (ICH7R). The XOR happens in the S-bridge, not the CPU as evidenced by a completely flat CPU usage profile during writes.

I would not recommend this for video processing due to slow write performance. If you do work that requires redundant intermediate data storage, I would put that on a RAID 10. I had that for a while and it's decently fast. If your work does not require redundant intermediate data storage, then create a temp space with RAID 0, and a permanent space with RAID 5. The controller allows for a matrixed array in which say 50 GB per drive is dedicated to a four-drive RAID 0 (which is VERY fast, btw, for your video processing needs!), and the remaining 450 GB per drive is dedicated to a four-drive RAID 5 array. That will yield you about 1.2 TB of permanent storage, and 200 GB of temporary, non-redundant (but fast) work space. You can put your O/S on the RAID 5, your pagefile and temp directories on the RAID 0, and get very good overall performance.