Time for a performance boost again

[bigH2O]

Well, my two year cycle has come around again, and this time I'm looking for performance, performance, performance.

I'm crunching huge files now.... photoshop files in the 1.5GB (yes, that's gigabyte) range. The AMD 64FX4200 dual core on top of the nVidia chipset is thrashing, DDR memory is straining, and hard drive writes are excruciating.

Of course "want" and "can afford" are two separate things, so after a lot of research on my specific needs and budget I've settled on an Intel Core 2 quad Q6700 processor running on the Intel 975 chipset, 4 GB of 800MHZ DDR2 Corsair RAM (5-5-5-18), Primary storage will be 2-750GB 7200.11 SATA2 drives in a RAID 0 configuration. I'm not concerned about data redundancy as everything on the RAID will be backed up nightly to multiple network drives... I'm using RAID 0 for the speed.

Now for the question. The board I've bought is Intel's reference board for the 975 chipset, the D975XBX2 (BadAxe) and comes with 8 SATA channels. 4 are controlled by a Marvel 88SE61XX chipset, and 4 are controlled by an Intel Matrix ICH7DH chipset. Both chipsets can be configured for RAID 0,1 or 5 independently of each other, or ran in jbod mode. I need opinions from people who have ran both chipsets in RAID 0 as to which of the two chipsets will be the better performing solution.

Thanks in advance.

[Zero Tolerance]

Not familiar with the board and when I looked it up I couldnt find any spec sheets that detailed the splitting of the chipsets.

However, I just have to always point out that hardware RAID is the best option. Ive never liked using software RAID arrays.

Ive been using the new SAS controllers. I have used LSI and adaptec and prefer the LSI because it seems better supported in the linux community than the adaptec. And the really neat thing is that if you go with a SAS controller you can use SATA drives if you are on a budget. You still get the reliability of hardware RAID with the lower cost of SATA. But if you have the money...go ahead and buy SAS drives to have the ultimate RAID solution.

For your needs though...software RAID might do fine. I just dont know if you are wanting a solid RAID solution...or just the best bang for the bucks.

[bigH2O]

Well both solutions that are built into the board are hardware raid in as much as they are configured through the board bios as opposed to software configuration, and the array will be recognized as a single drive without any software interference other than the controller driver installed at the time of the OS setup. Both controllers support RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5, which I've never seen on a fakeraid mobo before. Usually you're limited to 0 and 1 with the fakeraid (software embedded moboard) solutions.

I've been researching this over the last day and from what little bit of information I can find on it, these two chipsets are pretty much identical in performance, with the Intel controller having slightly better burst write speed and the Marvel controller being better suited for external raid... so I guess I'm going with the Intel chipset for the raid.

I re-thought the plan for the 2x750 GB RAID 0. I had just bought two new 750s that I haven't installed in anything yet and just figured I'd use them, but the more I think about it the more I think I'll be better off with 4 250s from a burst standpoint, so I ordered four 250s today. I'll just stick with the 750s for their original intended purpose which was NAS backup.

[Zero Tolerance]

Are you actually going to be doing a terabytes worth of backup over your lan? If so, what connection speeds do you have? I would hope at least gigabit or fibrechannel?

Have you experimented any with virtualization? If so how did you fare? If good, another option would be to make your new box a vmware server host and run your OS from a NAS/SAN iSCSI volume.

I use an open source product called OpenFiler which works with vmware. But not sure if any performance hits with vm overhead would be prohibitive for you. If not...then backing up your data would be a one time thing(DR purposes only)....because you could restore from a snapshot in VMWare or OpenFiler to get you back to a recoverable state at any time.

This may be the perfect time to make the switch to virtualization. I am doing more with virtualization every day. I have converted all of my domain controllers and terminal server to virtual machines. Built a pretty hefty box and am running VI3 (ESX 3i)....but I see average loads of 35-50 users at any time on my terminal servers and an average CPU load of 48%.

Anyway...if you do decide to go virtual....I can offer some help if the need arises.

[Zero Tolerance]

After looking into the model a bit deeper I found that you are right...its not a software RAID onboard...but its not exactly a full blown hardware RAID either....but rather a fake-RAID.

I also found a link you might be interested in that has some benchmarks from a very similar setup as you first described.

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about10052.html

I havent used a "fake-RAID" personally so I will reserve judgment on them. But still stand by saying that full hardware RAID controller is the best if you are wanting maximum performance and reliability. And for another 350 bucks to the price of your box might be worth it.

[bigH2O]

The backup solution I've been using for this for the last year or so is a product made by Software Pursuits called SureSync (http://www.spursuits.com/suresync/SureSync.asp). It certainly isn't an enterprise type solution, but for my measly 6 pc lan it is more than sufficient. I'm using it in mirror mode, so it only has to copy the changes to the storage drive over the lan, which are typically under 1 gb / day. I automatically copy different parts of the data to about 10 different hard drives, always more than once for each file, over all the different PCs. It is extremely efficient on the 1gb/sec lan, and not terribly shabby on the 54 mbps wireless (which is actually half that in bridge mode) between the shop and the house. The wireless transfers take place when I'm asleep for the most part, so I don't even notice them really. The setup allows me to have live copies of my data on different machines at different physical locations, so even if my house or shop burns down, I haven't lost anything. If both burn down at the same time, I'm screwed, but I've got bigger things to worry about in that case.

I don't think I'll be approaching a terrabyte in transfers, or even storage anytime soon. My reasoning behind a terrabyte in storage was only because I couldn't get scratch drives with a large buffer below 250 gb. Everything below that was max 8 gb buffer, and like I said all along... i'm looking for burst speed. The 4 250s 16MB drives will buffer 64 MB of data, which is the same as if I were using the 2 750s with 32 each, but the burst should be faster since I'm writing half the data to each channel in the latter case.

Coming up with killer solutions on a budget is always a challenge. I look forward to this time two years from now.

[bigH2O]

After looking into the model a bit deeper I found that you are right...its not a software RAID onboard...but its not exactly a full blown hardware RAID either....but rather a fake-RAID.

I also found a link you might be interested in that has some benchmarks from a very similar setup as you first described.

http://forums.legitreviews.com/about10052.html

I havent used a "fake-RAID" personally so I will reserve judgment on them. But still stand by saying that full hardware RAID controller is the best if you are wanting maximum performance and reliability. And for another 350 bucks to the price of your box might be worth it.

Well from what I can understand about these solutions, they're not really much different than plugging a pure hardware controller into a PCI bus. The general logic goes along the line that if the built in controller is running at full bus speed, which it typically is, how is it any different than a plug in card running at full bus speed, or in some cases 1/2 or even 1/16th bus speed.

Any movement of data across the bus requires a software solution at some point... so where do the subtleties lie between a fakeraid solution, and a true hardware raid solution. I think the lines are fading almost to the point where there isn't much of a difference, at least not from a throughput standpoint.

[Zero Tolerance]

Ok...makes more sense to me after the explanation.

I will have to keep my eye on the new motherboards with this type of RAID. I just thought that the fake-raid main importance would be the bootability of most any OS. Where as software raid(unless on a controller card) can be problematic if trying to install an OS directly on it.

Anyway...goodluck and will be waiting to see how it all works out.