ICH8R or Gigabyte RAID? Which to use?

[MaxBurn]

Specifically dealing with a GA-965P-DQ6 (rev. 3.3). On this board there is actually a choice according to the manual, you can use the ICH8R or you can use the Gigabyte controller. ICH8R has a bigger feature set but I don't care about that, specifically which has better management software????

Who is using it? Do you like it?

I have an aging 3Ware 7500-8 that I have used for a long time, currently with six drives so I think I am a little spoiled on the features in the manager software, which are really nice. At the moment I have two arrays on this card, one mirror for an OS and a RAID 5 for storage.

I am right on the verge of going with two 750 gig drives in a mirror and partitioning the OS/archive volumes on this one mirror and this will replace all the above hardware.

 

[ddrueding]

Simplicity is always a good thing. I can't say much about the management of either; but if you are sticking with RAID-1 there isn't much management to do.

 

[MaxBurn]

Well on the 3Ware card you get a page that tells you about the drive model number, serial number, firmware number and revision and the RAID configuration. Also has notification options and on line configuration / rebuild. All of the above available through a web page. The motherboard manual doesn't mention too much about these things, too much to ask from an on board solution?

 

[Bozo]

Don't know about the Gigabyte, but the Intel management software gives you a lot of info. Only ever had to do a rebuild 1 time on the Intel RAID, so my experiance is limited.

Bozo :joker:

 

[MaxBurn]

Cool, I am leaning way toward Intel but I haven't ever seen one thing anywhere on the Gigabyte utility.

Based on the download for the drivers the Intel one is over five times bigger so there has to be some goodness in it.

 

[Fushigi]

Or bloat.

The 965P-DS3 I just started using has the Gigabyte RAID on it. I am using it to mirror 2 Samsung 500GB SATA disks. Seems to work fine. I only loaded the RAID drivers when installing Vista; I haven't bothered with any utilities or anything.

Only gotcha was when after building the mirror I used the BIOS to turn on 'optimized' settings and it turned off the mirror (along with some other things like re-enabling the disabled floppy drive)! I didn't realize it right away so I had booted into Vista and worked for a bit then rebooted again and noticed the lack of a RAID splash screen. Going in to the utility I saw what happened and rebuilt the mirror. It correctly identified which drive was the most current.

My only other comment is minor; if you use the card you will up you PC's heat generation/power consumption by some small amount.

 

[MaxBurn]

Cool

Going in to the utility I saw what happened and rebuilt the mirror. It correctly identified which drive was the most current.

Good, did the rebuild have to be completed in the BIOS or was it allowed to continue to do its thing in the background as you booted and worked in Windows?

 

[ddrueding]

Well on the 3Ware card you get a page that tells you about the drive model number, serial number, firmware number and revision and the RAID configuration. Also has notification options and on line configuration / rebuild. All of the above available through a web page. The motherboard manual doesn't mention too much about these things, too much to ask from an on board solution?

Yep, I know, I have one I'm not saying that these features don't exist, just that they aren't nearly as useful unless you have a larger array.

 

[Bozo]

Cool



Good, did the rebuild have to be completed in the BIOS or was it allowed to continue to do its thing in the background as you booted and worked in Windows?

When I did a RAID one rebuild with the Intel setup, it did it after the OS booted.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Fushigi]

The Gigabyte did it in the BIOS. So the machine was unusable for 3 or 4 hours while it rebuilt. That's a minor annoyance at best as far as I'm concerned when it comes to a workstation. For a server it's intolerable.