RAID what?

[aug1516]

I like the Raid 0+1 idea if you can afford to lose half the space.

[butter_fry]

I have some interesting results for you that need to be taken into consideration before you make up your mind.

This is a picture comparing a 4x400gb raid0 array. They are a matched set of Western Digital RE2 sata drives.

In Red is an offboard PCI-X 133 Adaptec SATA/SAS Raid controller. Not the best, by any means, but its well built and fast. In Blue is the onboard nVraid.

That image basically speaks for itself. The nVraid controller can't handle the data. Also notice the CPU usage on the nVidia controller, that is what you're loosing to keep that stripe running even IF your board design can handle it.

Here are the same drives only with 2x400 this time.

Can't get much more identical.

YMMV, of course, but this is a dual core dual processor NF Professional based board. If anything has the bandwidth I'd guess this does.
I'm currently writing an expose` on someting we all forget to consider, the drive controller. Chipset manufactures just aren't building what we need for high load systems. With the price of GB per dollar at an all time low, many people are investing in huge ammounts of storage without taking into consideration the performance implications of all that data trying to get sucked through a straw. Gentlemen, we need fatter pipes.

-butter

[derektm]

butter,

How about 4x400 on the ULI 1575 SATA?