Windows XP Pro x64 for RAID?

[Norcross]

I just wanted to know if there were any advantages to using a 64 bit OS for a RAID configuation (assuming the RAID card has 64 bit drivers)

 

[scotty]

I don't think you'd see anything. I remember seeing a benchmark 'somewhere out there' a few years back comparing a particular RAID card across various OS's (Linux 32 bit, 64, Windows, etc), and I seem to remember performance was pretty much the same across the board. I haven't seen any 32 vs 64 bit benchmarks floating around specifically regarding RAID performance, but I'm going to wager a guess that performance is going to be pretty much identical. Short of needing more than 4GB of ram in the box, I dont see the point. And XP64 seems to be the bastard child that nobody wants to support in the first place, so getting things to properly work on it now, and in the future may be problematic. If you just need it as a general server or NAS, a (32 or 64 bit) Linux solution might work better.

 

[Madwand]

It depends on the details, including the quality of the drivers. Sometimes 64-bit drivers are unavailable or otherwise poorly supported. For NAS / network access, XP-64 sometimes performs better than XP-32, but this is not because of 32-bits vs 64-bits, but rather because XP-64 is based on the Server 2003 code base, which has a newer and somewhat different SMB implementation.

In addition, XP-64 can support single arrays larger than 2 TiB.