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Hardware Vs Software SATA Raid

G

gibu

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May 29, 2001
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Guys, as part of my current crash course education on servers I was looking at purchasing or building one. As such I would like it to have a hardware SATA raid controller. My question is, are the controller chips on motherboards a hardware or software controllers? I allways thought of them as hardware but perhaps I have been wrong. I have no interest in anything better then raid 1 at this point. I know they never have raid 5 on them.

Thanks a lot.
 
Anandtech reviewed the DFI LANParty nF4 SLI-DR with great praise. It supports Raid 5.

I believe that most motherboard raid controllers are hardware. However that does not mean that they are all created equally. I bought my raid controller before SATA. At the time it was the only Parallel ATA that would process reads seperately in raid 1 (mirroring, where a performance increase can be had by processing seperate read requests on seperate drives).
 
The Raid Controller can be built in on the MB or a seperate card. These are both hardware controllers. The level of Raid for either is determained by the manufacturer and can range from Raid 0 to Raid 51 (not a typo, 51). Almost all contollers are backward compatible in that if it will do Raid 5 it will do 0, 1 and 3 also.
 
The major benefit of onboard RAID controllers is that they dont waste either PCI bus or CPU cycles to function. They do all data management seperate of the main system and are faster than any software based application.

Personally I have most of my servers running RAID 10 because of the large databases.
 
I know that the preferable solution is to have onboard raid as opposed to an adapter card, and it can be had for cheap. I have a Socket A MoBo with onboard raid...which I don't use!
 
Not entirely correct unless you take out the 64 bit raid cards that are available. I don't know of any onboard controller that runs at 64 bit. Also, external cards can have much more cache memory, I run at least 64MB on my raid cards and the main server has 256MB on it's card. Onboard in not always the best solution.


Lumberg said:
I know that the preferable solution is to have onboard raid as opposed to an adapter card, and it can be had for cheap. I have a Socket A MoBo with onboard raid...which I don't use!
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Of course it's motherboard specific, but most MoBo SCSI / SATA controllers don't support hot swap nor more advanced RAID configurations....things you want for a server. Mirroring and striping are about all most will do, though it is done in hardware.

For example, I have several different SuperMicro server grade motherboards in the lab, and while they all have on board SCSI and SATA controllers, there's a plug in option on all of them for supporting the more advanced RAID configurations.

YMMV - etc....

Regards - B.B.S.
 
Thanks a lot guys for all the great information.

I think we have decided to build our own server based on recomendations from the software company that were needing the dedicated server for. I build home pc's all the time so the hardware isn't a problem, and I can get help installing the os and setting it all up once its running.

Our choice was between buying a dell 2.8 gig p4 or building a dual opteron system. Here is a very symilar build someone posted at newegg.com. The MB is the same, but were going for dual 160g 7200rpm drives and dual opteron 242's. The tech guy at exact software thought we would benefit from the performance boost of the dual system, and his only interest in all this is that there expensive software we bought looks as good as it can working for us.

We'll use the drives as raid 1 and have a 160 gig maxstor one touch usb drive for off site back up storage.

Oh, and I think we were happy with one gig of memory, but perhaops we should go two?
 
For the OS and your program you are really talking 500MB per processor not counting the overhead and other things that cut into available memory. Get the extra gig, it's cheap insurance.

gibu said:
Oh, and I think we were happy with one gig of memory, but perhaops we should go two?
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Yeah.. the minimum amount of server RAM today IMO should be 2GB. I run PCs with 1 Gig.

Also, most serious server specific funtion motherboards will have onboard RAID systems that can expand the controllers RAM and support hot-swappable drives.

Dell makes a good server box and for my university it makes sense from a cost/support view to stay with the state contract.
 
On my domain/apps server we run dual pentiums xeons w/ 2 gigs ram. We use a workstation to run as our backup domain controller/exchange server and that has one gig. My network is a small network consisting of only 30 or so work stations. I do know that we are running a Raid array in the doamin/apps server. If I remember correctly it is a Raid 5, but I honestly don't know anything more about Raid except the basics. Good luck on building it. I have built my fair share of boxes, but servers are definately a bit more of a challange.

Emo
 
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