Raid 3 Performance

[storrance]

I own the PNY 5 port SATA PCI card (SPU5103PPB) and I'll be setting up a raid in the next few days in an effort to protect some of my data.
I currently have 5 1TB drives running in an NASLite server. This is a home file server setup that is used to store photos, music, some data files, and a few movies.
I'm curious how a Raid 3 setup performs on this card vs Raid 1.
My original plan was to simply mirror my drives, but the added disk space that I'd get from Raid 3 is very appealing.
Also, how easy is it to recover from a drive failure on this card running Raid 3...I'd be using the BIOS for all interactions since NASLite is a pretty simple Linux OS.

EDIT: I just noticed that the v1.5 firmware allows rebuilding from the BIOS, so I'll be downgrading to that version before building my array.

[Tim Ettinger]

I have the same PNY card in use. Hard to believe how old it has gotten. I use it now with 3 WD Green 1TB drives, no trouble.

I've never used it with anything other than RAID 3, and never more than 3 drives. It's probably in it's last system.

When it was in my old Athlon XP 3200+ system, I had it with 3 300gb drives, and one did fail. I went through the process of rebuilding the array and dropping it again before I finally replaced the drive. In Windows you can set the rebuild priority, and I always kept it to low, so I never really noticed a performance hit. Generally the array rebuilt itself within a day.

After I first moved to Japan, I had it in a Pentium IV 3.4E HT system, and we had some pretty routine random power fluctuations which caused the array to drop once or twice. I don't remember what disks I had installed in the system, but again about 1 day to rebuild.

At this time, I have it in a QX6800 quad core system, connected to an UPS and a Silverstone 750 watt power supply. No rebuilds needed.

From all my time with it, I've learned it's going to drop a disk from the array if you have power fluctuations. It also needs a good quality power supply. Even for first generation SATA, I don't think it's the fastest around, but I want to free up the processor cycles. I use it mostly for video transcoding.

It may eventually find it's way into a NAS box when my other one gets filled up. No crazy problems with it, just older and not particularly fast. Should be fast enough to stream HD video, if that's one of your tasks.