2-4 port SAS RAID controller recommendations

Stonedofmoo

Stonedofmoo

Stonedofmoo

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Just looking into the new drive situation. I can't help but notice for about another £30 more than the latest VRaptor 150gigs you can get Seagate 15krpm Cheetah 15k.6 drives at the 147 size. These are much faster again on paper.

Only problem is you need a SAS RAID controller. Can anyone recommend one with only 2 ports, or 4 at the most. PCI-E preferably and not costing the earth. I'm really quite interested :)
 
sas raid cards are quite expensive. Areca use quality chips the smallest (no of ports) card they do is the Areca ARC-1212. I haven't heard the 15k.6 drives yet, but if the previous generations are anything to go by they are quite noisy.

Highpoint are about the cheapest they also have a 4 port card:

Highpoint RocketRAID RR2640X4LF

Not sure how good they are!
 
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I have seen them in stock at suppliers in uk for approx £105. Maybe slackworth can see if OC can supply them? Doesn't look like OC have any highpoint products so probably not!

google Highpoint RocketRAID RR2640X4LF you will find.
 
The LSI 8 port card is a nice option, full SAS/Sata coverage, having the flexibility of 8 ports and you can add the BBU to it for better resiliance / performance. I'm using the first bank of 4 ports for SAS drives and the second bank for Sata TB storage.
 
I'll have a look at this on Monday to see what I can find.

Would you be interested in purchasing the drives from OcUK as I could add a range of SAS drives as well.
 
You did recently have some SAS drives on the site, having some 3.5" SAS drives available would be nice, i'm looking for a few more. :p
 
Well certainly I'd be interested if you stocked the 147gig Cheetah 15k.6 drives as they are regarded as the fastest hard disk around in 3.5" atm. Plus I've seen them at £150ex VAT which makes them a reasonable alternative to the VRaptors.

Can you get the highpoint cards too? I can only see one stockist in the UK and looking at their price its about 1:1 with the US prices in $'s!
 
Stick with the Raptor, it'll be faster in single-user apps (games, etc). The Cheetahs are good in servers where they get multiple simultaneous requests.

Supply can also be a problem with the Cheetahs, they tend to be paper launches for a while then for the first 6 months only go to OEM's, then finally like a year after announcement you'll be able to get them from online retailers.

The biggest problem can be sourcing the cables though which connect the SAS controller to the drives directly, as the more common way is to connect to a backplane which is a different cable. Certain brands of card come with the cables, others (like my Areca) don't.

Speaking of the Areca, don't buy it, the 64Bit drivers are poor. Adaptec have now released a card which is faster (dual-core I/O processor) and cheaper than the high-end Areca's.
 
The Cheetah's are fast in every situation fella, but I'm not certain if they justify the extra running costs over a raptor or additional costs of the SAS card. Depends what OCUK get the Highpoint cards in stock for.

Theres a review of the 15k.6 drives here:
http://www.cluboc.net/reviews/hard_drives/SAS/seagate/cheetah15K.6_450gb/p1.asp

I see what you mean about paper launches though, I've yet to find anyone actually stocking them. But I'm in no rush :)
 
They are fast yes, I run 2 in RAID0 myself on a high-end Areca.

They are not as quick though in games, and other low-disk-usage situations as a modern Raptor. I've actually tested this.

They are absolutely brilliant though when you got concurrent users or heavy-duty apps which hammer the hard disk. They are also very fast for file transfers.

Here's a benchmark I took last year:

cheetahsraid0af9.jpg
 
Elric said:
The LSI 8 port card is a nice option, full SAS/Sata coverage, having the flexibility of 8 ports and you can add the BBU to it for better resiliance / performance. I'm using the first bank of 4 ports for SAS drives and the second bank for Sata TB storage.
Click to expand...

the LSI 8408E is a good solid card, even better if you can find one rebadged as a Perc 5/i ....a lot of them are brand new.

if you prefer to buy new/retail i'd probably stump up for the Areca range over Highpoint/LSI but finding a Perc for 60-70 notes is an absolute bargain and no brainer, it's a quality SAS/SATA hardware card.
 
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