Need Advice on a Mobo supporting Athlon 3000+ with RAID

[KwikEMartGuy]

Hi, I've been researching this topic on and off for a few days now, and need your advice:

I'd like a RAID 5 Setup to go with my AMD Athlon 64 3000+ CPU.

I almost bought a Chaintech ZNF 150, but after visiting www.amdmb.com forums, it seemed like a lot of people got bad chaintech boards (seems like their QA isn't very good).

Also, is RAID 5 on mobos worth it? Is it any good?? (3ware RAID cards cost hundreds of dollars for a reason).

Or should I just buy 3 drives, put my OS and /tmp on 2 drives with RAID 0, and my important documents on the third drive. (and just back that up once in a while). Also, I was thinking about buying 3 SATA drives, I am wondering if I should just stick to 3 IDE drives. Because, it's not hard to saturate the PCI bus anyway.

Also, I might be thinking about overclocking, so a board that's OC friendly would be good too..

Anyone here have a Athlon 64 board? What have your (or your friend's) experience been like???

I am thinking about <= $200 for a board....

Thanks a lot in advance for your input.

 

[Corporate Thug]

http://www.amdzone.com/articleview.cfm?ArticleID=1381

 

[KwikEMartGuy]

Thanks for the link ^. What do you think about the Raid 0 configuration mentioned above and Raid 5?

 

[JonB]

While I haven't fully researched it, I haven't seen any <$200US motherboards supporting RAID 5 from the motherboard. (not just for the A64 processor, but other consumer products as well). Some server boards have RAID 5, but they are expensive and use dual Xeons (also expensive).

RAID 0 and 1, certainly. Those are almost give away items now.

RAID 5 is more involved because it splits and stripes the data across three or more hard drives, giving you most of the speed of RAID 0 and the security of RAID 1.

We have a non-linear video editing system (Media 100i) at work that uses four high speed SCSI drives in a RAID 0 configuration. They used to require it to be RAID 5, but drive reliability has improved so much, they now recommend RAID 0 since you get a bit more space.