Thread: ASUS P5W DH Deluxe RAID controller.

How good is the RAID controller on the ASUS P5W DH Deluxe motherboard? It is listed as "0/1/5/10 Matrix RAID" on newegg.

I will be building a new desktop machine for home use in the next 2 months, and I am planning on running a RAID 1+0 with 4 drives (300-500 GB haven't decided how much storage i need yet). So I am wondering if the on-board RAID controller on this motherboard is good (not just good enough) to be running this setup, or if i should consider buying a separate SATA RAID controller card. Also if you would like to suggest another motherboard with a better controller than that of this board, the rough guidelines would be LGA 775 / 1066/800 / DDR2 800.

Thanks.

If you’re looking for real robust raid storage you should go serial attached scsi. If you’re looking for good raid storage on Sata you need to look at controllers from Areca, Promise, and 3ware.If you can live with adequate raid, raid 10 on your motherboard will be ok. Never raid 0 your data with out a really good back up plan.

It is amazing to me that motherboards have so many raid options on them these days. I have the P5W DH Deluxe and have run EZ RAID briefly to create a single drive letter scratch disk on two drives that were about half as large as I wanted the disk to appear. I have not considered using matrix raid primarily because there is no reason a single user workstation should need the level of redundancy that raid implies (but does not always deliver). If you search for discussions of RAID, you will find pros and cons. To sum it up, raid is a method of allowing a critical system to continue to run without an outage while failed drives are replaced and resynced. Doing backups is the preferred method of protecting data. There are many ways to destroy the integrity of a system besides drive failures. No raid level will protect a user from his or her own finger-checks. If the motherboard fails with your disks configured in a high level raid configuration, you will have to replace the motherboard with the same type or one with the same raid controllers. This can be a real hassle in a few years when a particular model of motherboard is harder to find. I know a videographer whose motherboard failed just before his render deadline and he was stuck trying to find a particular type of motherboard because his drives were in raid.
Don't think I am native about why one would want raid controllers. I work in a data center where we have thousands of servers that have a minimum of RAID 1 boot disks and SAN systems that have every RAID level of redundancy but the objective is simply to keep the systems on the network while repairs are made. Backups are done at the appropriate timing to preserve data integrity.

I would (and I do) forget the whole idea of raid and just spend the money for the spare disks in USB or eSATA enclosures to back up my data and keep it in a different location.

I appreciate what you are saying. I spoke with ASUS today and the technician believes the problem is with the bridge, since it isn't the same drive that is always freaking out. The issue I have here is that the same thing is happening on different computers with the same type motherboard.

I would love it to stay on (GOAL) however, when these drives fall out of synch (for lack of a better term) the machine blue screens and needs to be rebooted.

Thanks.

I'm having the same problem with my RAID5 and a drive falling out of sync. I'm just in testing mode right now so I'm using expendable data but I don't like what I see. I have a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R mobo which has the ICH9R chipset and using the Intel Matrix Storage 7.8.1013 (latest) software. It's sounding like this might be a systemic problem throughout the ICHxR line.