Legit Reviews

Ok, got the P5Q installed but did not do anything with the drives yet. I need to learn first ;)

Questions..

1. For 4 1TB drives, would a RAID 5 be good enough? I would hate to lose 2TB just for backups.

2. I can not have anything on the drives or it will erase it, correct?

3. It will take a LONG time to set it up - format it?

4. I can use a seperate hard drive to load the OS from and the raid for data...I do nto have to have the OS on the RAID?

5. this P5Q board has a thing called "Drive Xpert" - 2 sata connectors on the MB can be used to either do a 1:1 backup or to basically stripe them together to make 1 drive. I would like to do the 1:1 with the OS on the first and a backup on the 2nd, just incase the main drive ever dies. Does anyone know if this will work with also using the onboard RAID?

6. If the motherboard dies, I will lose my RAID and everything on it?

7. Using the onboard controller will cause the RAID to be slow?


Ok I will stop there, for now ;) I would like to take the 2 500gb drivesa I use for data now and make 1 the OS drive and 1 that backup drive, then have the 4 1tb drives as data and use a portion of it to schedule backups of the other computers on the network (if I can figure that out too ;) )

Mike

Anything else you think I should know, just holler!!

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Due to the size of the drives and it sounds like you are using onboard raid on the mobo, it could take a while.
4. Yes you should be okay.
5. No idea, my gut says no. Its usually on one feature or the other
6. Not necessarily, as long as you restore the raid to the same motherboard or another motherboard with the same controller you should be okay
7. Absolutely, Onboard raid is usually no better than software raid, but if its just for storage who cares?

Honestly if it was me, I would bypass the motherboard controller and use a cheap hardware one, then just use the motherboard connectors for single drives.

PM me, I have a PCI RAID Controller that I believe does more RAID types at home, that I could let go for cheap.