Best Motherboard with On-Board Raid Advice

Can anyone tell me what the best P4 motherboard with on-board raid is.
I'd like to use it with my existing 40 Gig ATA Maxtors? I've been
reading posts about the Abit KT-7, but those posts are pretty old.

Thanks in advance

Can anyone tell me what the best P4 motherboard with on-board raid is.
I'd like to use it with my existing 40 Gig ATA Maxtors? I've been
reading posts about the Abit KT-7, but those posts are pretty old.

Thanks in advance


The abit KT-7 is a atlon board

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 12:32:00 -0500, Tom wrote:
Can anyone tell me what the best P4 motherboard with on-board raid is.
I'd like to use it with my existing 40 Gig ATA Maxtors? I've been
reading posts about the Abit KT-7, but those posts are pretty old.

IMHO don't get on-board raid, just get a seperate raid card for whatever
motherboard you want or use software raid if your OS supports it.

--
Ray

Ray wrote:
On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 12:32:00 -0500, Tom wrote:

Can anyone tell me what the best P4 motherboard with on-board raid is.
I'd like to use it with my existing 40 Gig ATA Maxtors? I've been
reading posts about the Abit KT-7, but those posts are pretty old.


IMHO don't get on-board raid, just get a seperate raid card for whatever
motherboard you want

On board RAID controllers do just fine for simple things like
stripe sets and mirroring. For more sophisticated RAIDs, a
good caching RAID card only costs as much as another large
drive.

or use software raid if your OS supports it.

You definitely only want to do that *only* when hardware RAID
is not available to you. A two-drive software mirror or stripe
set typically triples the load put on your CPU compared to the
load imposed by even a cheap Promise or HighPoint RAID controller.
Most systems don't have the horsepower to both run a heavy
app like video encoding and also drive a software RAID - so trying
to do something like encoding video to a partition that is part of
a software RAID often reduces performance below what you would get
if you just used a single-drive system.

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:12:02 -0600, Rob Stow wrote:

snip
You definitely only want to do that *only* when hardware RAID
is not available to you. A two-drive software mirror or stripe
set typically triples the load put on your CPU compared to the
load imposed by even a cheap Promise or HighPoint RAID controller.
Most systems don't have the horsepower to both run a heavy
app like video encoding and also drive a software RAID - so trying
to do something like encoding video to a partition that is part of
a software RAID often reduces performance below what you would get
if you just used a single-drive system.

Eh, this isn't correct, by any means.

I hate to break this to you, but those cheap Promise and HighPoint RAID
cards are not hardware RAID cards by any means, they are simply IDE
controller cards with enough BIOS glue to fool a OS (Windows) to think you
have one drive instead of two. That's why you need special OS driver's to
use them, because _all_ the RAID logic is performed by the CPU, not the
RAID card.

Also, a modern UDMA drive has almost a zero effect on a modern CPU; with
software RAID all the CPU has to do is the RAID logic, which isn't that
bad. It certainly won't change the RAID performance.

--
Love tells us many things that are not so.
-- Krainian Proverb

Thanks for the info guys, but if someone still wanted to get a P4
board with on-board raid, what would the best choice be?

Asus P4C800-E Deluxe is the best raid enabled P4 motherboard currently
available.

--
DaveW



Tom wrote in message ...
Can anyone tell me what the best P4 motherboard with on-board raid is.
I'd like to use it with my existing 40 Gig ATA Maxtors? I've been
reading posts about the Abit KT-7, but those posts are pretty old.

Thanks in advance

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 18:05:53 -0500, Tom wrote:

Thanks for the info guys, but if someone still wanted to get a P4
board with on-board raid, what would the best choice be?

Intel 875 chipset from your favorite manufacturer... Intel and Asus
are usually favored but buy based on the features you need, these are
expensive boards.


Dave

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:12:02 -0600, Rob Stow wrote:
Ray wrote:

IMHO don't get on-board raid, just get a seperate raid card for whatever
motherboard you want

On board RAID controllers do just fine for simple things like
stripe sets and mirroring.

Right, they do just as well as a seperate raid card with the same chipset at
a SLIGHTLY lower cost but you're giving up a fair bit of flexability. If
that's the approach you want to take why bother building a system at all,
just buy a Dell and be done with it.

or use software raid if your OS supports it.

You definitely only want to do that *only* when hardware RAID
is not available to you. A two-drive software mirror or stripe
set typically triples the load put on your CPU compared to the
load imposed by even a cheap Promise or HighPoint RAID controller.

That's just plain bull. The cheap "raid" controllers whether they are built
into the MB or as add-ons ARE software raid. If you're seeing 3x more cpu
load with software raid (for RAID 0 or RAID 1) you're doing something wrong or
there is some other factor at work.

Most systems don't have the horsepower to both run a heavy
app like video encoding and also drive a software RAID - so trying
to do something like encoding video to a partition that is part of
a software RAID often reduces performance below what you would get
if you just used a single-drive system.

Encoding video wouldn't even push the limits of a single low end drive 2
years ago in most cases. In most cases we're only talking about a couple MB
(or less depending on what you're generating) of fresh data being generated
per second, hell you could pipe that over ethernet if you wanted to.

In a sense, software raid has the same advantage as a cheap pci raid card,
in both cases if you have a system failure you can transplant your data to a
different machine and have access to it almost immediately. Likewise it's
possible to upgrade your motherboard without disrupting your RAID array.

--
Ray

On 23 Dec 2003 07:04:01 GMT, Ray wrote:

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 15:12:02 -0600, Rob Stow wrote:
Ray wrote:

IMHO don't get on-board raid, just get a seperate raid card for whatever
motherboard you want

On board RAID controllers do just fine for simple things like
stripe sets and mirroring.

Right, they do just as well as a seperate raid card with the same chipset at
a SLIGHTLY lower cost but you're giving up a fair bit of flexability. If
that's the approach you want to take why bother building a system at all,
just buy a Dell and be done with it.

or use software raid if your OS supports it.

You definitely only want to do that *only* when hardware RAID
is not available to you. A two-drive software mirror or stripe
set typically triples the load put on your CPU compared to the
load imposed by even a cheap Promise or HighPoint RAID controller.

That's just plain bull. The cheap "raid" controllers whether they are built
into the MB or as add-ons ARE software raid. If you're seeing 3x more cpu
load with software raid (for RAID 0 or RAID 1) you're doing something wrong or
there is some other factor at work.

And yet those are the kinds of differences reported for even different
"cheap" RAID controllers a couple of years back.

Most systems don't have the horsepower to both run a heavy
app like video encoding and also drive a software RAID - so trying
to do something like encoding video to a partition that is part of
a software RAID often reduces performance below what you would get
if you just used a single-drive system.

Encoding video wouldn't even push the limits of a single low end drive 2
years ago in most cases. In most cases we're only talking about a couple MB
(or less depending on what you're generating) of fresh data being generated
per second, hell you could pipe that over ethernet if you wanted to.

2MB/s effective over 10Base2/T? I think not.... not even close.

In a sense, software raid has the same advantage as a cheap pci raid card,
in both cases if you have a system failure you can transplant your data to a
different machine and have access to it almost immediately. Likewise it's
possible to upgrade your motherboard without disrupting your RAID array.

Even the cheap RAID cards support things like hot swap/rebuild and there
*are* times when you may want to change the RAID config *before* the OS and
drivers get to do their thing on the drives. There may not be a lot of
hardware assist but it doesn't take much to make a difference.

Rgds, George Macdonald

"Just because they're paranoid doesn't mean you're not psychotic" - Who, me??