I did a little playing around with some extra hard disks yesterday to see what the on board SATA ports would do on my old Intel DX58s02 LGA1366 MB. I seemed to have discovered and then maybe read here and on the net that Raid 5 is a no go in terms of performance. While reads were in the 100MBps, writes were in the 5 to 20. I setup Raid 0 and did get a performance gain that was almost a multiple of disks individual speeds. I would like to be make a large/fast raid eventually, but it looks like I will need to build for the future since you seem to have to live with a system after its has a bunch of data on it. Raid 10 could be an option, but a hardware controller is probably a better choice since Raid 10 will mean more money on hard drives as opposed to spending money on a controller. I have not done the math, but a six disc 4TB system will get you almost 12 TB Raid 10, while Raid 5 will get you close to 20. It would have been nice to use the onboard ports, but it appears the software RAID 5 really stinks when moving data onto the disks. I don't think an ARECA is in my budget, but either that, or maybe a HighPoint? Am I missing anything?
Thanks,
Scott