I recently made a new gaming box and I thought that my old box would make a decent home server.

Specs:

CPU: AMD 3800+ X2
M/B: Asus A8N-SLI Premium (I have no idea why I bought this board as I don't O/C and I barely used any of the features)
RAM: 2x1 gig Kingston Value RAM 400Mhz
Video: 6600gt 128mb
P/S: Antec Earthwatts 500w
HDD: 80gig Sata drive

To buy:

HDD: four Samsung spinpoint 750 gig drives

The 80 gig would run as the system drive and the four spinpoints would run as the data drive.

This seems good on paper but I've run into a few problems.

-------------

1)

RAID arrays over 2 tb seems to break both the Windows limit on HDD partitions (for basic disks) and the physical limitations of the chipsets themselves. The Windows issue can be bypassed by installing XP x64 or Vista but there doesn't seem to be a solution for the chipset problem.

http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversi [...] 18158.html

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php [...] =18240&hl=

-------------

2)

The Asus A8N-SLI Premium has two sata RAID chipsets. The first is a nForce 4 and the other is a Silicon Image 3114R. My biggest problem seems to be that while nforce supports SATA II it does not support RAID 5 while the Silicon supports RAID 5 but does not support SATA II.

The thing that really ticks me off is that the Intel versions of the nForce 4 did indeed support RAID 5.

Also according to this article the Silicon's bandwidth seems to get saturated very quickly.

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/52680/

-------------

3)

I've heard RAID 5 puts a bit of strain on the CPU but I'm not sure how much it would affect a 3800+ X2.

-------------

So I seem to be stuck with running three 750 gig drives on the SATA 1.5 silicon chipset.

Would this run ok or will the performance be completely crippled?