CPU/Mobo Suggest cheap/good Intel motherboard for RAID 1

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vinayaga

vinayaga

Forerunner
My current hard disk is making some noises and Im sick of taking backups everyday. The whole idea of concentrating all your data on a 1TB disk is funny as one disk failure could wipe it all off.

So I have decided to go with two 500gb or 640gb hard disks and create a raid-1 system at home on the existing Quad core system. The current motherboard is a pathetic Intel DG31PR and will not do RAID.

So folks, please give me some choices on good intel motherboards for less than 5k that do RAID 0/1. I searched a lot on ebay and it seems like MSI does have a few models for 5k, but Im not able to get them locally in the shops I asked. And all the MSI's seem to be full ATX while I would prefer a microATX (I have a Antec NSK4400 and a full ATX would be a tight fit in there).

P.S : The other choice is a PCI Raid card. Will have to live with the quirks on the card and the slow speeds for the PCI card. And good cheap PCI raid cards do not seem to be available in India.
 
vinayaga said:
My current hard disk is making some noises and Im sick of taking backups everyday. The whole idea of concentrating all your data on a 1TB disk is funny as one disk failure could wipe it all off.

So I have decided to go with two 500gb or 640gb hard disks and create a raid-1 system at home on the existing Quad core system. The current motherboard is a pathetic Intel DG31PR and will not do RAID.

So folks, please give me some choices on good intel motherboards for less than 5k that do RAID 0/1. I searched a lot on ebay and it seems like MSI does have a few models for 5k, but Im not able to get them locally in the shops I asked. And all the MSI's seem to be full ATX while I would prefer a microATX (I have a Antec NSK4400 and a full ATX would be a tight fit in there).

P.S : The other choice is a PCI Raid card. Will have to live with the quirks on the card and the slow speeds for the PCI card. And good cheap PCI raid cards do not seem to be available in India.
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I think first of all you need to know what RAID is RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks which can be setup by combining two Same Hard Drives so as to maximize the Performance of the disks.their are a few configurations of RAID.

1)RAID 0
2)RAID 1
3)RAID 2
4)RAID 3
5)RAID 4
6)RAID 5
7)RAID 6

I'll be focusing on RAID 0 & RAID 1.

RAID 0 - basically known as Striping - Mostly used in Systems which require video rendering/editing or Faster Data Reading Speed.
The RAID controller stripes i.e make small parts of the data according to RAID stripe size which are 32k,64k,128k.then the data is written to both the disks simultaneously.
For Ex- if your data is of 256k then the RAID controller will divide the data into 2 parts (for RAID with 128k striping) & then the data will be written on to the disks as the 1st piece of 128k will go on 1st hard drive & the 2nd piece of 128k will go on 2nd hard drive so both drives will be written simultaneously which saves time & thus increases access speed.Similarly the data is readed from the disks.
But the main disadvantage of this setup is that if any one of the disk fails then all of the data is lost.

RAID 1- basically known as Mirroring - Mostly used in systems where Data Security is needed. in this setup you use two disks of same size but after creating RAID 1 you can only use the space of 1HDD i.e total space/2
that's because the data during storing to 1st HDD is copied completely to 2nd HDD (Mirroring) data access speed is the same as single HDD but the best thing is if one of the HDD fails then your data is not lost you can simply Plug in same new HDD & your PC is on.this architecture is mostly used in Servers.
But the disadvantage of this setup is data redundancy i.e. total accessible space=total space of both HDD/2.

so,i'll suggest you to go for RAID 0.
 
naveen58 said:
I think first of all you need to know what RAID is
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Buddy, thanks for trying to explain. I have been in the storage technology industry for half my career, ie over 7 years out of 13. So I understand RAID very well.

naveen58 said:
so,i'll suggest you to go for RAID 0.
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Nope. I need backup for the data in the disk if one fails at any time. Speed of access and striping are not of interest to me. As I said before, I will use two 640gb disks for raid 1.

Honestly, I appreciate your taking the time to explain this. Maybe I was not clear in the OP as to what Im looking for. Im clear that I need Raid 1 at a minimal cost. I could go with a PCI raid card, but for a little more Im looking for a good motherboard that does both.
 
Looks like a good board, but I cannot find it with Computer warehouse in Bangalore, nor with TheITWares nor ebay. Not sure if it is available.

My choice seems to be Palit N73PV. TheITWares seems to carry it for 2.6k.

Palit Microsystems, (HK) Ltd

Another choice would be XFX 630i, but I have no idea where this is available. Does anyone know if any TE dealers sell XFX boards ?

Motherboards - nForce® 6 series - nForce® 630i
mihirX said:
Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-73VM-S2 LGA 775 NVIDIA GeForce 7050/nForce 610i Micro ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards
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Oh man, just realized that both the boards are actually single channel memory. I wonder what is the real life difference between single and dual channel. Maybe TE experts can enlighten if this will make a big difference ?
 
Most of the intel motherboard series above 965 chipset, have intel matrix raid built in, which is a decent, average controller supporting Raid 0/1/5.

Cheapest ones will start at 3k.

PCI / PCIE RAID cards will cost you quite a bit, and then u will have invest in a battery backup for the RAID seperately, which will add another good amount.
 
vinayaga said:
Buddy, thanks for trying to explain. I have been in the storage technology industry for half my career, ie over 7 years out of 13. So I understand RAID very well.

Nope. I need backup for the data in the disk if one fails at any time. Speed of access and striping are not of interest to me. As I said before, I will use two 640gb disks for raid 1.

Honestly, I appreciate your taking the time to explain this. Maybe I was not clear in the OP as to what Im looking for. Im clear that I need Raid 1 at a minimal cost. I could go with a PCI raid card, but for a little more Im looking for a good motherboard that does both.
Click to expand...
i'll suggest you to go with a board that has nvidia 600 series chipset.
 
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