4x Hard Drives in RAID 5

     The last time we tested RAID arrays people wrote in to ask us to see some RAID 5 benchmarks. RAID 5 has become very popular in servers, due to the low cost of redundancy. In theory, if a hard drive goes bad in a RAID 5 array, there is no data loss and the drive is hot swappable. This means down time is reduced or completely eliminated. However, RAID 5 performance is much lower because parity must be updated on each write, requiring read-modify-write sequences for both the data block and the parity block. Because of the slower performance, RAID 5 just isn't seen in a gaming machine. At any rate, let's take a look at the RAID 5 performance on this particular integrated controller.

     As you can see from the benchmark, the burst Speed is up and the Average Read is fairly fast, but the Average Write speed is WAY down to only 8 MB/s. This might work okay for a server, but not for a gaming system where you want every component of the system to be operating a peak performance.

Conclusion (Part 1):

     The onboard SATA RAID controller on the EVGA 680i may not be the best example to use in a RAID project such as this one, but it does help give us a basic understanding of RAID and what to expect from an average onboard controller. With an onboard controller, 2 hard drives running in RAID 0 will increase hard drive performance dramatically. Unfortunately, running more than 2 hard drives does not give us a cost effective increase in performance. Running more than 2 hard drives in RAID 0 is only cost effective if you are looking for data redundancy or are simply looking for an increase in hard drive space. So for those who are wanting to purchase 3 or 4 hard drives to boost the performance of their gaming computer, you may want to reconsider.

     Just because the onboard controller of the EVGA 680i SLI does not show any performance increase after 2 hard drives in RAID 0 does not mean that this is the rule for all motherboards or RAID controllers. The fact is some onboard controllers are slightly faster, but the real performance increase will come from the addition of a good SATA RAID Controller Card. So where are the SATA RAID Controller Card benchmarks??? Well, you just have to wait for Part 2!