[thelist] [OT] Hardware question about RAID...

[Kristian Rink]

Tris;

Am Wed, 7 May 2008 14:39:06 +0100
schrieb Tris <beertastic at gmail.com>:
> This is what I was after, but assumed I'd need a raid card to do that.

> so my question is, will a motherboard such as:
> http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+%28Intel%29/Gigabyte+GA-P35-DS3L+iP35+Express+%28775%29+Motherboard+?productId=30549
> 
> Offer me a reliable raid set up?

Well... Yes and no. :) Reading 'cross the specs at first, I don't see a
RAID controller bolted to this thing, but it offers four SATA
connectors in total. To do RAID-5, you will need a minimum of three
drives so you might be capable of running some sort of "software RAID",
i.o.w. making your operating system build a RAID array basically across
three or four physical hard drives. It works, but (depending on your
environment and experience) setting it up might be a major PITA, same
goes for reliability and maintaineance of such a solution. :)

If you want to get a working RAID-5 setup quickly, you should either
get yourself a RAID controller card or go for a board that comes with a
RAID-5 capable controller out of the box (which is not common these
days as most of these seem to be limited to RAID-0 and RAID-1). Doing so
might save you quite a lot of pain at least setting it up, maybe also
talking about performance and stability of the solution. In example,
the Gigabyte GA-73PVM S2 NF 630i has:

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Socket+775+(Intel)/Gigabyte+GA-73PVM-S2+NF+630i+Socket+775+Motherboard+?productId=30523


Asides this however you might think about why you want RAID-5 for your
home system - are you out to have a performance improvement, or are you
"just" searching for a way to protect your data from hardware failures?

Cheers,
Kristian

-- 
Kristian Rink * http://zimmer428.net * http://flickr.com/photos/z428/
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"One dreaming alone, it will be only a dream; many dreaming together
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