Maximum PC

After one of my 250GB hard drives died, I'm investigating investing in some RAID 5 capabilities. Would it be better to buy an SATA RAID card or a new motherboard? What are some of my options in either direction?

It seems like this MSI motherboard is the best RAID provider on the Newegg, but I need some advice.

I don't mind buying a new processor as long as it's socket 939.

The best raid 5 cards are the XOR cards with on board processors and ram, all the rest simply offload the processing onto your CPU, which can slow the system down quite a bit.

Expect to pay $150 for a descent one, and $300+ for a top of the line model. IMO RAID 0+1 is more economical of a 4 drive solutions (though it only features 50% capacity) as you can use a cheaper raid card without hurting performance.

It seems like buying a new mobo/proc would be a better bet (and cheaper)...

I'm not willing to sacrifice 50% of my storage space.

w00t. I have that mobo. If you have a CPU that fits it, you should get it. my system isn't done yet so I can't really give feedback, but I hear that it ROCKS. Hence the reason I got it.

Why aren't there any dual RAID 5 options?

Because few cards can handle 6 disks.

The epox board has a 4 channel raid five controller on it. I would check into it. A good raid 5 card that won't crap on you will be a pci-x card anyways. So I would just look at a mobo.

Why not RAID XL?! How many hard drives do you plan on hooking up to this array? Here is a link to a 5-port NetCell SR5103 for $250. You can hook up to 5 disks and is 32-bit 66MHz (which may default to 33MHz depending on your mobo). If you want to know what RAID XL is, it is a revised version of RAID 3. The nice thing about RAID XL is that in the event of a HD failure, your throughput is completely unaffected; you run at full speed. Plus, with this type of RAID (as well as RAID 5) only the size of 1 disk is sacfriced for parity as apposed to 50% by RAID 0+1. The controller costs as much as 1 HD, but it should follow you around for future upgrades.

I don't know if you have the hard drives yet, but I just did searches today on newegg for hard drives and found the best bang for the buck to settle around 160GB Hard drives (WD1600JB). If you got 5 drives, the total would be $465 shipped with a capacity of 640GB ($.73 per GB usable). If that was too much, you could go with only 3 drives for $279 with 320GB as the capacity ($.87 per GB usable). If you wanted to go with 5 drive (similar to RAID 0 x 4 speeds) but not the 640GB capacity and price tag, you could go with 5x80GB drives for a total of $280 shipped and 320GB ($.88 per GB usable). I hope that helps you out a bit... I went with the 5 port RAID XL card and 5x160 GB solution. 640GB should be enough... I hope...

Arquero