switching HTPC to RAID?

[toomanyhandles]

I'm thinking of switching my HTPC to RAID, preferring RAID5.

Silicon Image Sil 3114 SATA controller:
- 4 x Serial ATA
- RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10, RAID 5, JBOD

is available on my ASUS K8N-E Deluxe board, with AMD Athlon 2800+, 1.8MHz, 1gig RAM. WinXP.

I have a few drives in it, but none matched.

I was pricing a new drive to backup a different system, and got to wondering about putting (a few) bigger SATA drives in the HTPC, then I can use its drives elsewhere.

Since the HTPC is on 24/7, has large quantities data I'm not really going to backup otherwise but would like to keep around, RAID5 seems useful.

--Any comments on this onboard SATA RAID controller? I assume it's really fakeraid but I haven't looked.

--throughput on this system likely to be up to the task? RAID5 overhead here, I read a bit and get mixed ideas about overhead- seems it shouldn't be crippling, and a true hardware RAID5 can have other limitations.

If I do this then I guess I just have to edit the recordings-dump.xml to point to one volume name rather than the 3 I have now, with the three drives, then reimport?

Thanks for thoughts-

[Spartan]

FWIW, I rather enjoy my RAID 5 system (see specs below), and have not had any problems with it whatsoever.

[toomanyhandles]

I'd be pretty happy with that system, too!

Not that it's a fair comparison to what I want to add, but it look like you aren't recording directly to the RAID5 array, even with the hardware RAID controller. Is there a reason/ did you try that?

[Spartan]

I'd be pretty happy with that system, too!

Not that it's a fair comparison to what I want to add, but it look like you aren't recording directly to the RAID5 array, even with the hardware RAID controller. Is there a reason/ did you try that?

...mainly because I already had the soft IDE RAID 0 in place. I really don't care much if I lose a drive on the recordings array. However, my wife would do unspeakable things to me if I lost home pictures / movies / documents... :eek:

[ACTCMS]

...mainly because I already had the soft IDE RAID 0 in place. I really don't care much if I lose a drive on the recordings array. However, my wife would do unspeakable things to me if I lost home pictures / movies / documents... :eek:

Very impressive set-up

Please feel free to ignore the rest of this post - I've got a bit of an obsession with backups... the only problem I can see is the event that totals the whole system - fire, flood or theft. I would be copying the pics/movies/docs to a 500Gb USB drive on a regular basis and storing it off-site - mother's/sister-in-law's/Daughter's/ whatever.

[-stattik-]

I used Silicon Image 3114 for a few years. It's not true Raid, of course, but it was very reliable. It would only get about 17MB/sec on writes but the reads were great. The reason I upgraded was because migrating to a larger RAID set (adding disks, etc) meant you had to reformat and start over which means you had to back up what was already on it which could be difficult if that was you main storage pool.

This is the card I got.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...id&x=0&y=0

It's real RAID (RAID 3 not 5 though but perfect for HTPC's) It does 100MB/sec on reads and writes and ~25MB/sec on random writes. It supports 3 or 5 SATA drives and requires no drivers. You can also boot from it. It will migrate RAID on the fly as well. Currently I have 3x400GB drives in a RAID 3 configuration. I plan to add two more as needed for 1.6TB of space. All this for $40.

Read the reviews. For RAID3, you can use 3 or 5 drives. The company who developed the drives is gone (hence the great price, I bought 2) but all the latest software for it can be located here.

http://home19.inet.tele.dk/amigay/Soft-Port/

[toomanyhandles]

Thanks for the information, I'll look into that card.

I really have no idea where I am at with regards to the write speed of my current setup; anyone have a favorite tool for that that does not need a blank drive to do the test? Did you record directly to the array on the 3114 that gave 17MB/sec with good results?

[-stattik-]

Thanks for the information, I'll look into that card.

I really have no idea where I am at with regards to the write speed of my current setup; anyone have a favorite tool for that that does not need a blank drive to do the test? Did you record directly to the array on the 3114 that gave 17MB/sec with good results?

ATTO bench32 is about the only one I could find that showed write speeds without having a blank disk.

http://kb.ciprico.com/lore/article.php?id=268

Here's the Netcell results:

http://www.pcper.com/image.php?aid=189&i...o-rv-3.gif


Yes, I recorded directly to the array with no problems. The only negatives I would hold against it are:

- No on-the-fly migration/expansion.
- Random Write speed.

I now have three ATSC tuners and one NTSC tuner. Recording all four at the same time puts about 7MB/sec on the array. The OS is completely responsive during this with the NetCell card .

[nia]

FWIW, I rather enjoy my RAID 5 system (see specs below), and have not had any problems with it whatsoever.

Hey Spartan.

I notice you partition your RAID. Why?

I'm quite happy with the flexibility of one (extendable RAID5) partition...

[johnburton]

I am running a network share of 4x750gb SataII Raid5 and finding no probs when recording/playback.

Also invested in a external firewire 1.5TB drive used to archive all important files, as ACTCMS is right. There is always some risk of losing two simultaneously and an external drive also gives flexibility of offsite storage.

Partitioning a Raid doesn't give much benefit as a directory structure generally provides a satisfactory means of grouping data.