Quote Originally Posted by XS Janus View Post
I also wondered about auto move function.
Do you know if you choosing "auto move when finished" option in torrent programs will prevent you from seeding that file as soon as downloaded has finished? (seems logical it will and that could cause issues with my ratio)
Well, I rarely use Torrents, so I'm not very familiar about that "auto-move" function, sorry. But, unless that function moves the files and updates the "read torrent+data from..." part (which would cause severe random reads on the RAID-5 array, and that's NEVER a good idea with RAID-5, hardware or otherwise), you'll automatically stop seeding that file, so yeah, that would pretty much kill your ratio.

Quote Originally Posted by XS Janus View Post
It looks that 160 could be enough now. BUT as I find myself DLding more and more HD and huge torrents this "could" be a problem. My notebook drive is constantly full. However I never seed that much so offloading files to the array sooner would be an answer for a 160GB drive.
This said If I find a way to buy a WD320AAKS and be sure I'm getting a single platter one I will probably go for it and not look back.
What you said, only difference would be that the price should be about equal for both parts... hehehe

Quote Originally Posted by XS Janus View Post
I think I would prefer manual offloading of files to. I don't think I could trust software for this, much. I mean moving files in windows is bad enough but moving it via got knows whose code... :/
Manual "Copy" option is my preferred way. Burned myself to many times enen with manual "move". One glitch and BAM! your directory/file is fried. whats been moved and what was not and what is complete is anybody's guess at that point. Joy for the whole afternoon...aahh...good times
lol I've never had issues with manual moves before. Unless on those files that were corrupted to start with (one of my server's memory sticks started missbehaving... it took me months to figure why I had to download some stuff twice, and sometimes video files had glitches...).

Granted, I don't move whole folders, only individual files (or groups of files), so that may well be the reason I have less problems... Though I'll keep that in mind.

Quote Originally Posted by XS Janus View Post
We'll see... first I need to get my stuff back from RMA and figure out what went wrong with my 1st attempt to assemble it. (thank God I haven't bought the controller card or all the drives, cause I don't think they would have believed me they were all a bad batch, if you know what I mean )
Well, if you had both, you simply had to wait to install them again, unless you couldn't point the origin of the hardware. THAT would be a tough sell indeed, one top-of-the-line RAID controller AND 3/4/5 über-capacity (and price... lol) drives all failing at the same time... Can you say "not happening"?

Btw, one thing I've been thinking (run for the hills! lol): RAID controllers are basically dedicated CPUs and memory for the parity calculations (not even needed when reading, unless if the array is cripled). Also, it's very clear that parity calculation takes a fraction of today's CPUs computing power (see the links I posted a while back).

So, my point is, since there are usually no backup bateries on CPUs like there are on hardware RAID controllers, to keep data from being lost after a power outage, software RAID most likely calculates parity for every block written, and sends it immediately to the drive, to minimize data loss, without even considering storing it on RAM. This, of course, creates abismal performance for software RAID, when it could actually be the fastest configuration available...

So, am I too off on this? I don't think so...

Also, would it be possible to rewrite Intel or Microsoft's RAID driver to actually use system RAM as cache, before sending the data to the array? This would open up insane performance boosts on software RAID...

Cheers.

Miguel