I purchased a gigabyte z68 motherboard for an HTPC and I'd like to do a raid 5 setup with 4 2TB drives for 6TBs of storage. I know it's a fake raid and the motherboard raid still utilizes the CPU but I'm mostly concerned with read speeds and not write.

Should I go ahead and invest in a raid card? Any suggestions? Or should I just go with the motherboard raid? What are the risks of adding a drive and rebuilding?

I've had a raid 0 motherboard array for a while with 2 old WD raptors and they've gone through a few installations of windows. Although I'm not 100% sure the difference between a motherboard raid and a software spanned array within windows. I'm able to configure the raid array through the bios and not windows so I assume it's controlled by the controller which doesn't need windows to configure.

Thoughts?

2/7/2012 7:56:02 PM

I don't know what you mean by "motherboard array"

I've always had good success with Adaptec RAID controller cards

2/7/2012 9:14:56 PM

http://www.freenas.org is pretty cool

2/7/2012 9:38:08 PM

are you doing this for performance...?

2/7/2012 10:09:46 PM

Are you doing RAID 5 for a balance between data parity and performance?

2/8/2012 8:49:54 AM

Not incredibly concerned with performance. Mainly because it's cheaper than a raid 1 or 10.

^^^^Motherboard raid as in a motherboard that supports Raid through the bios and doesn't require a software raid within the OS to run. Still uses the CPU though.

2/8/2012 8:53:31 AM

Hard drives are cheap, just go RAID 1.

RAID 5 is nothing but a headache.

2/8/2012 11:47:15 AM

They aren't right now with the flood.

Even if they were that'd still be an extra $300-400 investment just for raid 1 over 5.

2/8/2012 12:57:38 PM

^^this guy must have been living under a rock for the last 6 months... Hard drives are still considered expensive. And raid 5 is super simple to setup... wtf you talking about?

In terms of raid 5 on intel's ICH10r, it really can sucks. 30-40MB/sec writes min, but reads should still be close to the 100-120MB/sec+. It should be fine for your build.

If you want to grab a raid card, then look at Highpoint RocketRaid's, Adaptec's, SuperMicro and Intel's stuff. I'd look at a 1x or 2x SAS port since you can just get one cable and attach 4 drives easily. You can cheap out and stick with 3Gb/s versions and be around the $90-120 price range.

[Edited on February 8, 2012 at 1:05 PM. Reason : ]

2/8/2012 1:05:17 PM

Although the disadvantage to motherboard raids are if the controller fails you need the same one to read the array. If you use a spanned windows/software raid any computer can read it as long as it has the software.

2/8/2012 1:55:50 PM

I guess it depends on how important your data is, and the likelihood that you would replace the motherboard with the exact same model if something went wrong. I think you would be better off with a raid card.

2/8/2012 2:13:58 PM

I agree, if you are doing an HTPC/NAS build, a dedicated raid card is a nice feature to have, specially over intel's ich10r crap.

2/8/2012 2:55:37 PM