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I'm currently looking into building a couple new systems for Vista, any information on how well these chipset based RAID systems work under it?

One CRITICAL ITEM (?DEFECT?) was not mentioned in the published regarding the RAID capabilities of the various ICH7/ICH8 RAID supported chipsets, as well as the Intel Matrix RAID technology; the 2TB “wall”! And it supports only 4 drives not 6 drives!

With Seagate shortly releasing the 1TB drive, and six SATA300 connectors on the ICH8R (and other ICH8 RAID family members), one would think that a 6TB (5TB RAID5) volume was possible. Not so, the 2TB limit comes into play; not even six 500GB drives will work (four OK at 2TB/1.5TB RAID5).

Most P965/G965 motherboards only have one PCIE x16 controller slot, usually used for a video controller; thus even a PCIE x16 storage controller is not an option, unless you can find one that offers full performance with a PCIE x4 controller slot.

Intel has had this issue from day one of the release of the ICH7R, it has yet to be resolved, and it is not even addressed as a “defect” on the ICH8R that will be “fixed” in a forthcoming hardware/software revision/release!

Please see below response that I received from Intel:

This is in reference to case number 7176817 with Intel (R) Desktop Board DG965WH and Intel (R) Matrix Storage Manager.

Here is the response to your concerns about the release notes that were not listed in the following release notes for the Intel (R) Matrix Storage Manager.

As to the Reference 2015920 "Volume size is limited to 2TB" in all OSs in the Intel (R) Matrix Storage Manager Production Version 6.1.0.1002 that were not mentioned in the later release of Intel (R) Matrix Storage Manager Production Version 6.2.0.2002, signifies that the issue was not resolved. This means the limitation is still there. At this time there's no expected time of resolution.

This limitation also pertains to the total RAID Array size as well.

The Intel (R) Desktop Board DG965WH is limited to 4 hard drives. You may be able to add another controller card to support more than 4 hard drives, however, Intel cannot support this configuration.

Below are links to the last two release notes for the Intel (R) Matrix Storage Manager.

http://downloadmirror.intel.com/df [...] notes.html
http://downloadmirror.intel.com/df [...] notes.html


Tim

barturtle,
Aside from possibly having driver issues, Vista should not have an affect on the RAID you set up and vice-versa. Vista will see the RAID(s) as one logical disk and you use it as normal. This is where the Mobo-provided disk monitoring utilities come in handy. They will provide the health statistics of your physical disks while Vista alone will not give you the full picture.

Are you seriously complaining that you can't have more than 2TB? What home user needs or even wants >2TB? What possible application could it be used for? The only thing I can think of is if you had your own particle accelerator in the basement... But then you'd probably have a server with a lot more than 2TB anyway... so what on earth is your problem with this?

Plankmeister - That's what people were saying ('round about) 10 years ago when 800MB disks were the norm. 2TB will be the norm before you know it. With the recent agreement for movie downloads, people will have their entire video libraries permanently stored on their PCs. Games are also getting bigger. The voices of experience will tell you that any size disk made will soon be filled.

Plankmeister,

Next month you will see retail 1TB drives from Seagate, several other manufacturers will also introduce drives larger than 500GB. All at the time of the MS Windows Vista launch . . .

You missed the second serrious point, you have six drive connections (SATA300), but you are supose to use only four of them for fixed disk drives. I gather Intel had optical drives in mind for the other two drive connectors.

But nowhere are these limitations clearly stated on anuy of the public sales documentation, or even on the retail box itself. Intel was pulling a "fast one" with specifications.


Tim

Ok. So, let's say someone (legally) downloads 200 DVD9s... loads of films, TV show box-sets... etc etc... Plus they download... I dunno... let's say 5000 mp3s. That's about 2TB. There's VERY few people who have that many DVDs.

Seriously... how much do you need? I've got 160GB, and the stuff I download (legally, of course ) I backup on to DVD. After all, if I had 200 DVDs all sitting on my HDD and it died... Well... that's an awful lot of time I'm gonna need to waste downloading the same things again.

Where does it stop? Petabyte storage in your home PC? Exabyte?? Come on... 2TB is ridiculous for a home PC. If you really need that much storage, build a SAN. I work for one of the Big Five, and of all the clients we support here in Denmark, the largest SAN we provide and support is 2TB, and that's for a very large multinational corporation with about 25,000 employees worldwide.

Ok, maybe in 5-10 years this kind of storage space will be needed as new content licensing schemes allow the legal download of digital content, but right now... I really think all of the digital media that's available for purchase by download would only fill maybe 1TB.

(But I agree... Intel's spin on it is obviously an intentional non-disclosure)

I was wondering about the same thing, especially with the ICH8R. The Intel ICH8R RAID10 write performance is a bit lower than I expected, but still seems OKish (averaging about double performance of a single drive), but read performance is very mediocre with only about 78 MB/s, so I really wonder if these results can be correct?
Also, it would be interesting to see how much CPU% the Intel software RAID5's require.

The RAID5 is a "pig", as it is not fully buffered with its own cache as is with most PCI-X/PCIE-X4 storage controllers. For some reason Adaptec stayed out of the SATA II RAID fray with a PCIE offering, leaving 3-ware-AMCC and PROMISE.

I probably will use one, as the ICH8R is sounding more and more, like a piece of crap.

I am a reseller, and in the US, 2 - 750GB's or 1TB's drives for a basic Windows Vista Ultimate using specially configured (and a "approved" by the MPAA et al.) systems by Gateway, Dell, and HP (at first) will seems small in one year. As it stands now, the "special build" system with the encryption hardware will only by offered as built and sealed systems by Gateway, Dell, and HP (at first); it will include CableCard (CABLE LABS) capability.


Tim

RAID0+1 in a perfect world would be equal to RAID 0 and may approach RAID 5 only in writes because of parity, but because it is split across 4 drives instead of 2, it performs better. It would have been interesting for them to include some of the RAID controllers recently reviewed for comparison, since I am thinking about doing a RAID 5 array. How much performance increase would I see when going from the onboard RAID to an add-in card? Do onboard RAID controllers not make good arrays? Final question, if I were to use an add-in card would a pci version be bandwidth limited and what is a reliable, relatively inexpensive RAID card?

I realize that add in RAID cards have an advantage because of no cpu overhead, but what is the advantage of it being fully buffered with its own cache.

Plankmeister, you have to realize that it is completely legal to record television on your own with a tv tuner, a 40 minute tv episode with commercials cut and after being compressed normally will take up about 350 mb. In raw form, which average users will keep it in, it takes up about a couple gigabytes.

On another note, when is CableCard supposed to come out and are we going to be able to build our own pc's with CableCard?

AMD today unveiled the ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner - the industry's first and only device that enables users to watch and record premium HD digital cable content, such as HD ESPN and HD HBO, on their PCs. The ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable Tuner turns a PC into a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) with easy to use Microsoft Windows Vista Media Center menus and interfaces. It is scheduled to be available starting January 30, 2007 inside desktop and notebook PCs from the industry's top PC manufacturers.

That will definitely eat up some of that disk space. I'm sure it comes with some software that compresses it pretty tight but it will still use more than current formats.

Is it just me or does it seem we are getting a tad off topic in this thread. It is all good info though. I'm sure there will be many announcements this week with CES ongoing. Thanks to TheGreatOne.

Hitachi's Deskstar® 7K1000 @ 399.99 SRP - 1TB - Due in two weeks.

Back to topic please

My question as to why the RAID10 read speed is so low still remains unanswered... (*hint* *hint* )

1TB drives are "on topic", and there is no consumer motherboard with an onboard controller that seems to be able to support more than two of these. Nor at present, does there seem to be any consumer motherboard with an onboard controller that supports more than 2TB. Moreover, it seems in Intel’s eyes that four drives are the supported limit, despite six might work, or might not on a case-by-case basis.

The current Intel ICH8R/ICH7R seems to have the above stated limitations, not only on Intel branded motherboards, but on other brands that use the ICH8R/ICH7R controller on their motherboard. Nor is anyone of these manufactures clearly disclosing these limitations.

Most of what I have been stating has been “on topic”, and my postings as of late have been in rebuttal to the original posting by Plankmeister. At first the marking for Windows Vista in the US will take a completely different approach and pricing strategy than the US, and some offerings that will coincide with the consumer release of Windows Vista or be available in a few months. Almost all of these offerings will consume generous amounts of space if the system is not well managed (and that is most consumer systems).

An area of concern with the arrival of fixed disk drives 500GB and larger is “data protection”; RAID1 mirroring is an option but is expensive, RAID5 is pretty much the “industry standard” but requires three equal fixed disk drives offering a good level of “data protection”. RAID6 is very good for “data protection” but a fairly new standard, and gets a tad expensive plus RAID6 requires a minimum of 4 drives to implement.

RAID10 and other “nested” RAID level are usually not for consumer usage, as with the case of RAID10, it is very expensive with high overhead, with very limited scalability at a very high inherent cost. RAID10 is usually recommended for database server requiring high performance and fault tolerance.

The RAID Cache acts as a buffer, retaining records in cache for as long as possible until being replaced by newer transactions. The RAID Cache operates on a first-in, first-out principle keeping as many records in cache as is physically possible. Each time a record is requested, it is placed at the top of the queue so it will be retained longer in the cache. A frequently accessed record may never leave the cache. The amount of the required cache is governed by the intensity and frequency of the read/write activity from the host application. The greater the access intensity, the more the environment would benefit from a larger cache.


Tim