Questions about RAID options

[Tripredacus]

I am now at the stage, when determining what to do with my next computer, that I am thinking about RAID options. I usually like the idea of RAID1 for OS and RAID5 for storage.

My next OS will be Vista Business, and I have questions regarding 32bit vs 64bit. The motherboard I've settled on is the DP35DP, which has onboard RAID support. I would use the onboard for RAID1 for the OS, but I am concerned about the driver support for Vista. Also I would like to look into a card to do RAID5 and yet again more concerns about drivers.

The RAID card that I would be interested in getting would be a 3ware, but I do not understand their definition of connectors, being Discrete or Multi-Lane. Are these typical server board slots? For example, here at work I use the 9550SX and 9650 but they are 64bit cards (using 64bit slots in Intel server boards). I know that the motherboard I am going with does not have these slots.

Also, 3ware's cards do not seem to have Vista driver support, but do have Server 2008 32 and 64bit driver support. Can these be used in Vista?

Then again, I may not even use RAID for storage at all if this becomes too troublesome. Perhaps instead I can put together a low cost server to run as a NAS instead.

The ability to use 64bit Vista will determine wholly on driver support. I might not even make that jump as of yet, and deal with 3.2GB RAM in Vista 32 for a while.

Tell me your thoughts on this.

[Zxian]

Vista has out-of-the-box support for Intel's onboard RAID controllers (ICHxR). Setup the RAID in BIOS, pop in the Vista disk, and you're off to the races. I've setup multiple systems on Intel RAID controllers without having to worry about driver issues.

As for 3ware, their website needs to be updated. They have a KB article regarding the issue, and the while you're out of luck with the 9550SX in terms of official support (they say 9.5.1 should work), the 9650SE has driver support in Vista and Server 2008. See here. I'm going to be updating my server to 2008 soon (it has a 9650SE), so I can let you know how things go if you'd like.

Discrete and Multi-lane describe the type of cable used. Discrete cabling means that there is a cable plugged into the card for each drive attached. ML cables are a 1-to-4 breakout cable, shown here.

The 9650SE just requires a PCIe slot with enough lanes for the specifications. From the looks of that Intel board, you only have one PCIe x16 slot (which I'm assuming will go towards the graphics card). Clearly, you'll need something with an additional PCIe x4 slot (or higher) in order to fit the card.

Also, just because I would feel bad not to mention this, if you use the 9550SX in a regular PCI slot, you'll severly hinder the performance of that card, and possibly bog down the rest of the system depending on what else is connected to the PCI bus.

Hope this helps.

EDIT - After being corrected by cluberti, it turns out that Vista supports ICHxR controllers up to ICH9R - but not ICH10R. My bad.

[Tripredacus]

Thanks for the info. I already have used the 9550SX and 9650SE in Server 2008, so I know those work fine. 2008 actually has native support for the 9550 but you need a driver for the 9650.

I have also talked about this with a guy here and I've come to the better idea of just running a couple large drives JBOD, but leaving open the option of building an additional storage server. That would cut down the cost of drives if I only need to get 2 RE drives for the OS and standard drives for data.

EDIT: I wanted to clarify my 2008 experiences. Server 2008 standard 32bit and 64 bit have built in support for 9550, only tried 64bit with the 9650, not 32bit.

Edited December 12, 2008 by Tripredacus

[Zxian]

The separate storage server is another option (it's what I do at home), but I probably wouldn't recommend running JBOD for your local storage. If you're not going to combine the drives in RAID, I'd just leave them separate and mount them in your current file system.

From my understanding, Vista and Server 2008 have a very similar driver model - so what works on one should work on the other. I'm not 100% confident about this, but perhaps some of the more knowledgeable members can shed some light on this.

[eyeball]

Vista and server 2008 drivers *should* be near identical. My X64 server 2008 is actually using pretty much all Vista X64 drivers. I guess because the Kernel Version is the same it just works. But as Zxian said maybe someone more knowledgable can tell us why it just works