ICH10R and RAID/AHCI

Discussion in 'SSD and HDD storage' started by BLEH!, Jul 28, 2013.

  1. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Is it possible to run a RAID 5 array on an X58/ICH10R AND an SSD at the same time in AHCI or not?

    Cheers
     
  2. FatBoyNL

    FatBoyNL Ancient Guru

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    As far as I know, Intel RAID mode implies AHCI as well.
     
  3. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    Is "does Marvell support AHCI" your real question?
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2013
  4. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Nope. My motherboard doesn't have a Marvell chip I don't think. It has eSATA and SAS, but neither of those I would use as they're connected to the nerfed PCIe 1.0 lanes on the southbridge.
     

  5. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    RAID uses AHCI anyway so even if all ports are set to RAID you should still be able to use a single drive as well. Theoretically. What board is it?

    Btw why would u want a raid 5 array?
     
  6. FatBoyNL

    FatBoyNL Ancient Guru

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    That might be an important question to BLEH!.
    I've setup RAID5 with 5 HDDs once with my old nForce6 mobo. Read speeds were higher indeed, but write speeds were (far!) below of just using one single drive.
    My conclusion is that a separate (non-onboard) RAID controller with its own cache should be used to obtain better write speeds. EDIT: when using RAID5.
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2013
  7. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    Yeah RAID is really not going to improve performance on a home PC. Don't be fooled by benchmarks.
     
  8. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    It's an ASUS P6T7WS Supercomputer. I've got 5 x 1 TB drives I wanna use as a backup for my music projects and for storing my videos etc, and RAID5 is the most logical use of the storage I think. I've been thumbing with the idea of building a more modern/lower power (maybe Haswell) gaming rig and repurposing my current "980X"/P6T7/24GB rig as a home server, using the RAID functionality with a smaller SSD bootdrive.

    As above basically. I want my main rig to be a bit more modern ideally, able to make use of SATA 6 and USB 3.0 properly and feed my 7970 Xfire, the current setup is 3-4 years old and quite thirsty on the old juice.

    I have also considered keeping the current rig and getting a dedicated low power home sever (same drive setup, using an AMD APU w/A85 chipset maybe) if that makes sense, but given how much I use the main rig and how much power it draws (CPU @ 4.4 GHz is 250W +)... you get the idea.
     
  9. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Or would I be better getting a dedicated RAID card?
     
  10. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    I'm not a fan of RAID at all. I have 1 SSD and 5 HDD's, all are single units.

    OS/Apps on SSD, everything else on HDD.


    You realize the OS can access multiple single drives at the same time right? Reading from one while writing to another is about as fast as raid.

    Up to you man I'm just letting you know how it is....
     
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  11. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Just more bothered about easy redundancy/faster access than anything else. I've got a gigabit capable network, so that's no issue.
     
  12. FatBoyNL

    FatBoyNL Ancient Guru

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    For RAID5, I suppose so. That would make it a bit more redundant as well. An onboard RAID5 array would probably be lost completely when the mobo dies. With a dedicated RAID card, the RAID array might survive. Unless the dedicated RAID card dies of course ;).
    EDIT: and even then, replacing the dedicated card that died may enable you to restore the array.
     
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  13. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Isn't it possible to do software RAID with windows/Linux as well/instead of?
    I've been having a few issues with this rig recently as well, random crashes and what have. OC related definitely, so I do feel it may be time for an upgrade.
     
  14. FatBoyNL

    FatBoyNL Ancient Guru

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    Nah, I wouldn't go for pure software RAID. Maybe RAID10 (a stripe of mirrors) is an option for you?
    E.g.
    http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/10/raid10-vs-raid01/
    http://aput.net/~jheiss/raid10/

    Halves the amount of resulting space though. Don't know if your mobo supports it (EDIT2: of course it does :p). Running RAID0 and/or RAID1 should work okay as no parity bits have to be calculated during writes. Don't have any experience with that, unfortunately.
    But I reckon it will be faster than RAID1 anyway :)

    EDIT: I see you have 5 drives. So RAID10 would leave you 1 spare drive which you could use as a stand-alone. When 1 of the drives in the array breaks, copy the contents of the spare to the array (could be risky with less redundancy left ;)) and add the spare to the array in order to rebuild it.
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2013
  15. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    RAID10 is definitely an option, though quite inefficient on the old space side of things. You are effectively losing 1/2 of the storage available, whereas a 5 x 1TB RAID5 would give 3.8ish?
     

  16. FatBoyNL

    FatBoyNL Ancient Guru

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    5x 1TB drives will amount to a 4TB RAID5 array. Total capacity of a RAID5 array equals "n-1" times the capacity of a typical single drive being used.

    But of course, Windows will show 3.73TB or something like that ;)

    EDIT:
    RAID10 would get you just about 1.87TB. I see your problem there :(
    But the spare drive will get you another TB available, although not redundant.
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2013
  17. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Something comes to mind: some of the drives already have data on 'em. Some of it I can probably delete. Might be best building a sever from scratch maybe with 3 identical 2 TB drives or something to that effect in RAID 5.
     
  18. Pill Monster

    Pill Monster Banned

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    Honestly man I wouldn't bother with RAID, you'll end up disappointed.

    However the best way to see for yourself is by doing it, at least then you'll know from your own experience....:)
     
  19. BLEH!

    BLEH! Ancient Guru

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    Fair enough mate. I was just throwing ideas around BTW. I have a few hundred quid spare, might build a cheap AMD rig to play around with these kinda things, or spend a bit more and Haswell up my main one, not sure yet, though I do believe SATA6 would definitely unleash my Verterx 4 a bit more, and RAID0 of those would be something else entirely :p

    Cheers.
     
  20. Matt26LFC

    Matt26LFC Ancient Guru

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    I put my 2 256GB M4's in RAID 0, while benchmark scores shot up real world performance in everyday tasks was the same.

    Who knows though, maybe with your workloads (music projects) you'll see a benefit, I sure didn't lol Still happy with my storage atm don't think I'll buy another SSD until 1TB SSDs are more available and cheaper
     

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