Motherboard with Supported Raid 5 - Lion

[garfielder]

Greetings.

I have previously build a Hackintosh with Single hard drive running lion.

I am planning to build another one and one of the requirements is Raid 5 storage.
Preferably as boot disk.

Has anyone got positive experience building machine with build in motherboard raid controller using raid5 as main disk?
Or the only recommended way is to have one disk as boot and separate raid 5 disk set to store data?

If the second is the only way - any success stories on particular hardware?

Thank you.

 

[powerpcg5]

There's no software RAID 5 in Lion. If you want RAID in OSX, you'd have to buy a hardware card. Apple sells a RAID5 card. -- I don't know if that allows booting off a RAID array though.

Most software RAID5 is only for data (even Windows). The system disk cannot be a software RAID 5. But some RAID5 cards (usually the expensive ones) will allow system to be installed on it and boot on it.

If all you need is RAID data protection (via cheap/free software RAID5), and don't care where the data resides, you can setup a central Windows server and do software RAID5 on it. Then all workstations in your home/office (OSX, Windows, etc) can connect to that Windows server via smb://.

 

[garfielder]

No I am not looking for software raid.
Most of modern Motheboard already have controllers capable of running raid configurations.
If those cannot be used with Lion (I have successfully used them with various Windows setups.) then does anyone has recommendation on particular controller that would be bootable from?

External server is not an option for this case (There is already one but it's used for different kind of storage and work.)

 

[Red Chief]

All Sandy Bridge motherboards support Raid 0/1/5 so that you can configure it in the Bios, but this means using the RAID setting instead of AHCI, and the question is: Can you read and write it afterwards from OSX w/ AHCI?
I wonder since I would be interested too.