Motherboard RAID5 Questions (plus a little extra)

DaftBehemoth · September 30, 2013

So I have a couple questions about running RAID off of a consumer motherboard. I have a Z68A-GD80 that lists support for RAID 0, 1, 5, and 10. I also have a 2TB WD Green 3Gb/s that is nearly full (which is why this question comes up). I would like to increase my storage capacity and have some redundancy so I want to implement a 3 disk RAID5 and pick up a couple more 2TB WD Greens. I have an external drive that I can use to backup the 2TB disk before setting up RAID.

So with this in mind:

1. Is RAID5 setup as simple as plugging in all three drives to my SATA 3Gb/s ports, switching the SATA mode to RAID, and then booting into the RAID setup utility?

2. Should I get a RAID card for simple storage that doesn't need to be fast? (only fast enough to play Blu Ray rips.)

3. If I'm switching my SATA mode to RAID for this array and my SSD needs to have ACHI... how does that work? Do I simply take a performance hit by not running AHCI? Should I just get a second Intel 520 and run them in RAID0?

4. (Bonus Question) I can't seem to get my SATA 3 drivers working during my latest reformat. I've had it working before but now I don't remember what to do... While trying to select the proper driver to install during my Windows 7 install, it can't find the drivers on my flash drive. Does anyone now exactly which driver I should install?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

tycheleto · September 30, 2013

1. Some motherboards only support RAID on the boot drive, am not sure about the MSI board.

2. RAID 5 Cards, even those will only 4 ports, are not cheap if they're any good. Note that for RAID 5, if you ever have a hardware failure, you would probably need to replace them with the exact same model to have any hope of recovering data, and even then data recovery is not guaranteed. Makes motherboard RAID relatively more risky in my opinion. If you are simply playing Blu-Ray Rips, and aren't too worried about writes, you really only need 10-20MB/s, so a high end RAID card is not needed for storage performance(though it will benefit overall system performance). Do note that running RAID on your motherboard does incur a CPU overhead and performance loss, so these are some other things you need to factor in.

3. Again, depends on whether you can even do RAID for non-boot drives. Some motherboards may allow you to set the settings for each individual port as opposed to the whole system, but I do not believe your MSI motherboard has that(I have the Z68A-GD65). Also, if it does work, I guess you have no choice but to take the performance hit. It is a small hit but nothing that you can do about it. Running two RAID arrays on the same motherboard is probably not a good idea from a reliability standpoint. Even if it does work, your CPU overhead is quite high and there is a big chance of things going wrong.

4. Sorry not very familiar with SATA drivers.

Overall, I do not strongly recommend running RAID on the motherboard, as the performance+reliability problems are too significant, even if it is a cheap option. If you want to save money, you might want to consider software raid such as Snapraid or FlexRAID. You don't get the performance advantages of RAID 5, but you do get the benefit of redundancy(they have parity). These two programs also allow you to have snapshot raid, which while having higher maintenance, will allow you to take a smaller performance hit on writes, and compute the parity when you have the time(preferably every night at least). Not the best idea if you are constantly writing to these drives.

DaftBehemoth · September 30, 2013

1- Yes

2- Yes, Dedicated cards are always faster than motherboard implementations

3- From memory the SSD will no longer have TRIM support due to running in Raid mode. You can Raid0 for sure. But really you won't notice performance differences apart from benchmarks

4- Just google your motherboard model number and find the driver list for it on the manufacturers website May take a little while to find the right driver but it's easy enough and will be the latest driver which is an added bonus

I did actually do that to get the drivers for my board. The only thing I can think of is that I must have got the drivers for the wrong revision of the Z68A-GD80. It's too bad I have to reformat again just to test that. lol

1. Some motherboards only support RAID on the boot drive, am not sure about the MSI board.

2. RAID 5 Cards, even those will only 4 ports, are not cheap if they're any good. Note that for RAID 5, if you ever have a hardware failure, you would probably need to replace them with the exact same model to have any hope of recovering data, and even then data recovery is not guaranteed. Makes motherboard RAID relatively more risky in my opinion. If you are simply playing Blu-Ray Rips, and aren't too worried about writes, you really only need 10-20MB/s, so a high end RAID card is not needed for storage performance(though it will benefit overall system performance). Do note that running RAID on your motherboard does incur a CPU overhead and performance loss, so these are some other things you need to factor in.

3. Again, depends on whether you can even do RAID for non-boot drives. Some motherboards may allow you to set the settings for each individual port as opposed to the whole system, but I do not believe your MSI motherboard has that(I have the Z68A-GD65). Also, if it does work, I guess you have no choice but to take the performance hit. It is a small hit but nothing that you can do about it. Running two RAID arrays on the same motherboard is probably not a good idea from a reliability standpoint. Even if it does work, your CPU overhead is quite high and there is a big chance of things going wrong.

4. Sorry not very familiar with SATA drivers.

Overall, I do not strongly recommend running RAID on the motherboard, as the performance+reliability problems are too significant, even if it is a cheap option. If you want to save money, you might want to consider software raid such as Snapraid or FlexRAID. You don't get the performance advantages of RAID 5, but you do get the benefit of redundancy(they have parity). These two programs also allow you to have snapshot raid, which while having higher maintenance, will allow you to take a smaller performance hit on writes, and compute the parity when you have the time(preferably every night at least). Not the best idea if you are constantly writing to these drives.

You bring up some very valid points. I may just contact MSI's support and ask them what my mobo can support for RAID more specifically. I also didn't consider software RAID before. I'll look at a few options and see what I think.

Thanks for the in-depth responses guys.