Good SATA RAID Card

R4z0r

R4z0r

R4z0r

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Joined
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Hi Guys,

I'm currently using onboard SATA RAID5 in my HTPC and am looking to upgrade to a hardware solution. My main issue is that whenever I do anything CPU and disk intensive (i.e. ripping a DVD, extracting large RAR files, etc) the performance is shocking.

Can anyone recommend me a cheap card (<£100) that will fix this issue?

Thanks!
 
R4z0r said:
Hi Guys,

I'm currently using onboard SATA RAID5 in my HTPC and am looking to upgrade to a hardware solution. My main issue is that whenever I do anything CPU and disk intensive (i.e. ripping a DVD, extracting large RAR files, etc) the performance is shocking.

Can anyone recommend me a cheap card (<£100) that will fix this issue?

Thanks!
Click to expand...

Anything below £100 will be basically a software implementation of RAID5, what you require is a hardware implementation, like something from Areca, 3Ware AMCC etc...but a 4 port card will be costing aound £200...
 
jbloggs said:
Anything below £100 will be basically a software implementation of RAID5, what you require is a hardware implementation, like something from Areca, 3Ware AMCC etc...but a 4 port card will be costing aound £200...
Click to expand...

Hmm, that does seem a lot for what I want. Are you able to recommend any particular models though?
 
I'm using a DELL CERC 1.5/6 card. It's a Dell badged Adaptec 2610SA.
A PCI-X card (also works in a std 32-bit PCI slot though) - 6 SATA channels (only SATA not SATA2). It has 64MB cache.

So far seems fairly good - good speeds in raid0, not tried others yet. Needed to mess with the driver to get it into Vista 64, but other than that has been excellent. Cost around £50 from a popular auction site.

Hope that helps.
 
Thanks Daz, that looks like the sort of thing I'm after.

Just had a look on Adaptec site and there's no Vista drivers listed for 2410SA (I only need 4 ports). What did you have to do to get yours to work?
 
Keep an eye out for the perc 5/i too R4z0r - If you're lucky it won't cost more than £50 either.
It's a pci-express card (think it needs a x4 slot), and can take up to 8 sata drives, but can also handle super fast enterprise SAS drives. I'm quite happy with it's performance in my file server. With the ordinary PCI PERC card you'd be limited to around 100MB/s, but PCI-E gets you a lot more bandwidth than that.
You'd need to buy some sas to 4xsata fanout cables though, which run at a tenner each (need one per four drives)
 
Zarf said:
Keep an eye out for the perc 5/i too R4z0r - If you're lucky it won't cost more than £50 either.
It's a pci-express card (think it needs a x4 slot), and can take up to 8 sata drives, but can also handle super fast enterprise SAS drives. I'm quite happy with it's performance in my file server. With the ordinary PCI PERC card you'd be limited to around 100MB/s, but PCI-E gets you a lot more bandwidth than that.
You'd need to buy some sas to 4xsata fanout cables though, which run at a tenner each (need one per four drives)
Click to expand...

That looks like a really good card but I think my motherboard is only PCI-E (X1) so not sure if it will work?

Here's the spec for my motherboard, do you know if it would be OK?

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products...board&ProductID=2551&ProductName=GA-P35C-DS3R
 
I'm afraid it won't work on that board, R4z0r, it needs a x4 or better slot to fit into.

Try to pick up a highpoint rocketraid 1820a, it'll fit in a PCI slot, and has decent write speeds in raid 5 :
http://img176.imageshack.us/my.php?image=1106061571km1.png
Image from tweakers.net review.

bear in mind that the max you'll get from a 32bit PCI slot is 133MB/s, if you're lucky, but it should be a big improvement on write speeds from what you have now.
 
Thanks for the help everyone! I went with the Adaptec card (2410SA) which I picked up for £26 delivered :D Hopefully it'll sort out my problems!
 
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