ASUS P5Q PRO Raid 5 without controller

mahade

December 31, 2008 9:15:47 AM

Summary of my question before I throw some information at you:

Question: I'm going to run a raid 5 setup without a dedicated raid controller, or so I think - is the onboard raid chip on the motherboard below sufficient to deliver great performance, or will I find my system to be no faster than having a mere single hard drive?

Additional information:

I've placed an order at a local computer hardware shop for the following:

ASUS P5Q PRO motherboard

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB HDD (4 of them)

The specifications for the motherboard show the following:

Storage Controller: ATA-133, Serial ATA-300 (RAID)
Storage Interface: Intel ICH10R with support for, among others, raid 5.

So I know that I can setup Raid 5 on this system, but I am not sure about the performance. I would appreciate anything that would point me in the right direction (although a straight answer would also suffice!)

Additional questions:

1. Is that Intel ICH10R a processor that's gonna calculate parity bits and such?
2. If not, my CPU will have to calculate stuff I suppose - will my setup still be faster than, say, the same hard drive in a single setup (no raid at all)?
3. If my CPU is going to calculate stuff, would a quad core CPU offer better performance than my current dual core?

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dpschein

June 4, 2009 11:04:07 PM

For your first semi question you referenced would you notice a performance gain?
For RAID 5, the purpose is data loss protection, not HDD performance, hence if you decide after reding this to use RAID 5, you will have a more stable system that is not faster.
If you are looking for a performance increase, you would want to look at RAID 0, which is striping, and does not used parity bits and such. Basicaly it will allocate "stipes" or each information to different drives to speed up the read and then again the write processes for the disks. In this case there is no data protection and you will lose both drives and all data if one fails (note I said both, since commonly you would use only 2 drives for a RAID 0 setup).
And for you additional questions-
1.- The intel ICH10R chip will handle all RAID processes if you use a harware Based RAID setup. If you are simply converting your disks to dynamic disks in Windows and then using the OS to setup the RAID Configuration (called software RAID) your processor will do all the parity bit calcualtions and RAID operations.
2.-So I guess that response answered your second question.
3.-If you are using a software based RAID configuration, then having a quad core would definatley improve your system performance.
Also, as a side note, if you use Windows for configuring a RAID setup, then you must have a seperate disk, not in the RAID, for the OS files and sytem files.
Hope this answers your questions, and i didnt care to look at the post date!
Cheers

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chaosinmind

October 14, 2010 5:27:27 AM

dpschein said:

.....For your first semi question you referenced would you notice a performance gain?
For RAID 5, the purpose is data loss protection, not HDD performance, hence if you decide after reding this to use RAID 5, you will have a more stable system that is not faster.......

dpschein, I hate to dig up an old thread, but I was searching for RAID-5 performance benchmarks for my motherboard and came scross this thread, I'm attempting to potentially save future me's from a train wreck.

RAID-5 is for both redundancy AND performance. dpschein, you must be thinking of RAID1. When scaling beyond 2 or 3 drives RAID-0 starts to look stupid and RAID1 does no increase size or speed of the array. So in a four drive setup RAID-5 is pretty smart. It alternates the parity between all the drives and increases throughput.

SOURCE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Quote:

RAID5 (block-level striping with distributed parity) distributes parity along with the data and requires all drives but one to be present to operate; drive failure requires replacement, but the array is not destroyed by a single drive failure. Upon drive failure, any subsequent reads can be calculated from the distributed parity such that the drive failure is masked from the end user. The array will have data loss in the event of a second drive failure and is vulnerable until the data that was on the failed drive is rebuilt onto a replacement drive. A single drive failure in the set will result in reduced performance of the entire set until the failed drive has been replaced and rebuilt.

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