Support for Intel ICH9 hardware RAID?

[WoodrowStool]

I have a small Mini-ITX motherboard with a modest dual core Atom processor running Windows Server 2008R2. Using the onboard Intel ICH9 RAID controller I can saturate a gig network link pulling files off this thing - the performance is really quite good. I want to dump Windows as a home NAS platform and migrate to NAS4Free, which I already have up and running (with great success) on another system.

I don't want to lose the performance of the hardware RAID controller. Question - has anyone had any experience using NAS4Free with an ICH9 controller and letting the ICH9 create the RAID volume, in this case RAID5? Will NAS4Free be able talk to the ICH9 to see failures inside the RAID volume and be able to manage degraded RAID5 volumes?

I'd appreciate any feedback from users who have been down this road. If you think I can probably get similar performance using NAS4Free native software RAID5 I'm fine with that too, but I don't have enough memory (4GB) for ZFS AFAIK. I've got 4 2TB disks that I would like to use as a single volume.

Thanks for any and all helpful replies.

[raulfg3]

Whit ZFS is recommended to use soft Raid.

Please google a bit about performance: https://www.google.es/search?q=hardware ... erformance

article in Nas4Free wiki: http://wiki.nas4free.org/doku.php?id=faq:0144


and 4GB is minimun RAM to use ZFS, but works, and it's stable, only recomendation is not to use dedupe.

Please try a RaidZ1 implementation instead hardware raid5

[WoodrowStool]

A follow-up to my own question - I went ahead and wiped the system (Jetway dual core Atom motherboard with ICH9R RAID controller, 4GB, Windows Server 2008R2) and loaded NAS4Free (latest version), configuring 4 2TB disks as software RAID5, reloaded 5TB of data and ran some simple benchmarks. Reads are about 750 mb/sec, writes are around 500 mb/sec over a gig lan. So it is slower than the Server 2008R2 / "hardware" RAID solution, but not terribly so. The additional features of NAS4Free make this decision a no-brainer.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this project. After using NAS4Free for a month building two home NAS systems, and after trying FreeNAS for a while, I am very, very impressed with N4F. Well done everyone!

[raulfg3]

and loaded NAS4Free (latest version), configuring 4 2TB disks as software RAID5, reloaded 5TB of data and ran some simple benchmarks. Reads are about 750 mb/sec, writes are around 500 mb/sec over a gig lan. So it is slower than the Server 2008R2 / "hardware" RAID solution, but not terribly so. The additional features of NAS4Free make this decision a no-brainer.

please test raidZ1, not only speed, test what happen if one disk fail or if you need to change mainboard.