RAID + Sata3 guidance needed

[bill1971]

Hey folks -

Sorry for my delinquency here. Much sorrow the last couple of years or so, that I won't burden you with, but I do have a RAID question as it relates to drivers and Win7 64-bit installation.

(Although having built close to a hundred boxes over the years, it was only on my most recent build for myself that I ever employed a RAID array. It was RAID0 using 2 brand new, at the time, WD 300 gig Velociraptors. Ran tests on both drives before the XP PRO install. Everything fine. Before you know it, around 4 weeks go by, and one of the high $$$$$$ Velociraptors dies - Doh!!! So I'm a little gun-shy of RAID.

Building a new box, since I have no experience with Win 7. Using an ASrock X58 Extreme 6 board, since it has 6 Sata3 ports. (Most boards sport only two). The Sata3's are controlled by a Marvell driver. But the Marvell setup only supports RAID0 and RAID1. I think a RAID5 setup might be best. Will the RAID setup via the Intel Storage Mgmt software support Sata3? The documentation on the ASrock CD references Sata2 but doesn't mention Sata3.

Any input regarding the above would be greatly appreciated as always. I looked at some wikipaedia info on RAID, and if that info is correct, there should be no loss in performance, using the formulas presented. My son does play FPS games on this box, so game performance is important

The HDD build would be either 2 x WD 750GB Sata3 6.0gb/s drives in a RAID0 array, or three of those same drives in a RAID5 array. I just need a little guidance here.

There will also be a WD 1.5 TB Sata3 drive for storage of encoded video files, moviefiles, etc. Like mentioned previously, I'm a little hesitant about using RAID0, as I
tend to back up data only about once a month, if I think about it.

Thanks again for any and all input.

- Bill

[JLK03F150]

Hey Bill

I recall reading that SATA3 doesn't offer any performance increase with platter type hard drives, only SSD.

Personally I'd stick to using the Intel RAID controller instead of the Marvell. I've just had good luck with it (and not so good luck with a JMicron). If you use RAID5 with 3 drives it can rebuild itself in the event of one drive failing, which is less risk than the RAID0 array.

So the 1.5TB is to backup the array? You could just get two of them & run RAID1 instead.

[bill1971]

Thanks for the response, JLK -

So the whole Sata3 on platter drives is mostly hype?? Figures.

I'm considering what you suggest - just running 2 x 1.5TB drives in a RAID1 array, as long as the all round performance hit would be neglible. And I am leaning toward the Intel RAID setup in the BIOS, tied to the ICH10R chipset vs. the Marvell.

Does a quad-core increase the performance in a RAID1 array, as far as writing info to two drives? I understand the read performance is not affected(?)

Many thanks again for the response. Much appreciated.

- Bill