Raid 0 on 8KDA3J

Thordon

I was advised when buying the parts for my Athlon 64 system that if I wanted raid I should go for the EPoX 8KDA3+ board, if I didnt I should go for the 8KDA3J. I went with the 8KDA3J.

http://www.epox.nl/english/products/motherboard/8kda3.htm

• 2 S-ATA ports from onboard nVidia host controller with RAID
• nVRAID for combined P-ATA and S-ATA RAID

Now this is the page for both the 8KDA3+ and 8KDA3J, but it mentions:

• 4 extra S-ATA ports from Silicon Image Sil-3114 controller with RAID 0,1,and 10
(only on 8KDA3+)

Since it dosent say '(only on 8KDA3+)' on the earlier bits, does that mean I can set up 2 SATA drives in raid 0?

Venom

The 4 exta sata slots mean you can have 6 HD on your pc in raid 0 or raid 1 configs. The Silicon Image Sil-3114 controller is used to handle the extra 4 HDs while the nVidia controller would be used for your primary raid setup. You can set up all 3 raid drives in raid 0 is you wish.

po0k

And what's the actual performance like?

I'm considering 2x WD120JBs in Raid0 on an nForce3 platform.

Thordon

Well in theory you'd get double the read and write performance by using both SATA channels at once.

po0k

I know the "theory", but I've my doubts about any "raid" solution that doesn't come in the form of a PCI-X SCSI Raid card with a fat heatsink on the XOR chip.

knifey_spoonie

Well , Im running two seagate barracudas with the built in controller on the abit nf7s . Ripping a dvd and encoding it into divx takes 10 mins for the rip to the array and the convert to divx takes less than the length of the movie per pass , usually encoding at 30-35 fps, maps in battlefield vietnam have a nice loading speed increase over the old 40 gig 7200 rpm maxtor. The system is a 1800@2100mhz 512 megs of ddr ram @400 mhz.
Its hardly scientific evidence , but Is seems to have given me a decent increase in speed

Akula

Raid 0 is great for some uses... pants for others. Depends on what you want to use it for and what the bottleneck is in that particular app.

If you are loading large files from your hard-drive, moving them around and copying them, then raid is perhaps for you. If its pure number crunching stuff then prob no benefit and may even be slower depending on the size of your stripe as it sucks main processor power.