SATA RAID questions

[Bino]

I'm looking at the Adaptec RAID 5405 controller for my next build.  Anyone out there have any experience with it?  It is at the low end of Adaptec's range of cards with their 1.2 GHz RAID chip, supports several RAID configurations, and has 256 Mb of write cache (battery optional).

TIA 

[FLS]

If you get a MB that supports Intel's Matrix Storage Manager you can have raid 10, that's raid 1 and raid 0, on the same pair of HDs. That let's you put your OS and critical files on the mirrored partition and your games etc on the striped partition. With 320 gig HDs costing $60 it's cheap, safe, and fast.

[Fulmar]

I'm looking at the Adaptec RAID 5405 controller for my next build.  Anyone out there have any experience with it?  It is at the low end of Adaptec's range of cards with their 1.2 GHz RAID chip, supports several RAID configurations, and has 256 Mb of write cache (battery optional).

TIA 

What exactly does the battery back-up do?  I noticed the batteries are Lithium Ion meaning they're rechargeable and I wouldn't expect more than 5 years service life out of them.  And since it's proprietary, Adaptec will gladly charge you $150 for something that should be about $50 (with the attached circuit board).

[Bino]

Among the advantages of a RAID controller with its own processor and RAM cache is that the main system CPU can (possibly) go on its merry way doing other things after sending an I/O request to the sub-system on the controller.

A battery backup for the RAM cache ensures that in the event of an abnormal main system halt any data still in the cache which has not yet been written to disk will be preserved.  And yeah, I agree that the price for the Adaptec battery is a rip-off.

[Bino]

If you get a MB that supports Intel's Matrix Storage Manager you can have raid 10, that's raid 1 and raid 0, on the same pair of HDs. That let's you put your OS and critical files on the mirrored partition and your games etc on the striped partition. With 320 gig HDs costing $60 it's cheap, safe, and fast.

Sorry, but the Intel manual (PDF file) says that the minimum number of drives for a RAID10 volume is 4.  More info here on page 12.

Here is Intel's description of RAID1 and RAID0 on two drives via "matrix raid."  I think they are trying to slickly sell "RAID1 and RAID0 side-by-side" as though it were RAID10, which is not, strictly speaking, true.

[FLS]

The drives are partitioned. One partition is the striped drive, the other is mirrored.
It may not be strictly Raid 10 but it's essentially RAID 10. What is Krusty looking
for that this doesn't provide?

[Bino]

On a true RAID10 array, all the data is mirrored, so it's safe, and all the data is also striped, so it's relatively fast.

On the Intel "matrix raid" setup, only half of the data is being mirrored, and only half is striped.  The half that is striped is not redundant.  So long as you accept that, it's fine, I guess.