[Pc_Support] RAID options for SATA

[Damien McKenna]

The onboard SATA controller on my motherboard, or rather one of them, 
supports RAID 0, 1, 10 and 5 using a Silicon Image 3114 chip and I'm 
brainstorming my options for setting up a RAID later on this year.

I read a comparison recently of the SI3114 versus two hardware-based 
RAID cards in RAID-5 usage and the SI chip came out very well for most 
operations, in fact it had the consistently good scores for reads & CPU 
usage but was slow on writes.

My primary goals are:
1. Reliability for when problems arise, i.e. one drive dying not taking 
out the entire RAID.
2. Ease of use for rebuilding should #1 happen.
3. Speed
4. Capacity

This would primarily be for use with the OS and important data, I'll 
keep a large-ish ATA drive for misc junk / mp3s.  I was also thinking of 
getting four equally sized disks, they're pretty cheap and if it gave 
extra reliability it'd be worth it.

As I see it four discs would open up two main options:
* RAID-10
* RAID-5

Has anyone used RAID-5 with four discs, if so how well did it work?

-- 
Damien McKenna, husband, father, geek.
damien at mc-kenna.com - http://www.mc-kenna.com/