Which array is fastest/most reliable to boot from

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sethbest

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I am currently setting up a system as a backup server, and intend for it to have a raid 5 setup on 4 hd's through a 3gb/s sata raid controller pci card, one or two raid 1 mirrored ATA IDE arrays, and possible using the 2 sata on the mobo (both 1.5gb/s) for another mirrored array but it would have to be through software since the nforce 2 raid controller isnt working with sata drives.

So my question would be, which array, if any, is best for my boot drive? the 3.0gb/s raid 5 would seem the logical choice but i imagine that gets bottlenecked at the pci slot, so next up would be the onboard sata, but how much would that get slowed down by software raid? so that leaves the mirrored ata ide drives, western digital caviars, 16mb cache, 500gig drives.

Also i have read a few posts about people having their systems slowed to a snails pace with os's on arrays, is this a concern?

Thx
 
I am currently setting up a system as a backup server, and intend for it to have
  • a raid 5 setup on 4 hd's through a 3gb/s sata raid controller pci card,
  • one or two raid 1 mirrored ATA IDE arrays, and possible using the 2 sata on the mobo (both 1.5gb/s)
So my question would be, which array, if any, is best for my boot drive?
Raid-5 requires an ODD number of drives, the extra is for the parity
see this and click on the {5} button
the 3.0gb/s raid 5 would seem the logical choice but i imagine that gets bottlenecked at the pci slot, so next up would be the onboard sata, but how much would that get slowed down by software raid? so that leaves the mirrored ata ide drives, western digital caviars, 16mb cache, 500gig drives.

Also i have read a few posts about people having their systems slowed to a snails pace with os's on arrays, is this a concern?

Thx
Even MS discourages the boot drive on a raid. see this

Reliability? That's Raid-1, Raid-10
 
RAID 5 does NOT REQUIRE an odd number of drives. One of the drives will always be a parity drive. You will end up with (n-1) amount of actual capacity as the information is spread across all of the drives. It just requires 3 or more drives - and your best bet would be equally sized and spec'd drives. Even better would to be make sure you're using hardware RAID and not the cheaper/much more common software based RAID.
 
yeah, using a raid controller card for the raid5, and using onboard raid chip for the pata raid 1 (maybe use raid 10) I was only considering sofware raid in the case that I use the mobo's sata connectors, which do not support raid through the nforce 2's chipset.

Sorry if i wasnt clear about that. Basicaly just want to know if booting from an array that is using a pci controller card would get bottlenecked at the pci interface, and if in that caseit would be better to use the slower pata's on a mirrored array.
 
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