Affordable hardware SATA raid 5 card

Bigsy · 14 Aug 2006 at 22:10

I have a decent'ish pc that I no longer use, so wanted to make a NAS box out of it as I have tons of data I always need sharing.

I think raid 5 would be a sensible solution as I have 2x spare SATA disks and was going to buy another 2 anyway.

So what's the best cheapest hardware card? Seen a Adaptec 2610SA for around £100 which seems quite good.

Oh and it really does need to be hardware as this is going to be a linux box and I ain't messing with fakeraid drivers. Also PCI as the mobo doesn't have Express..

ajm · 15 Aug 2006 at 09:37

Plenty to look through Here

rpstewart · 15 Aug 2006 at 10:20

Hardware RAID5 on PCI might be a bit tricky. All the PCI SATA cards I've seen either don't support RAID5 or do so using the main CPU.

The Adaptec one you mention is new to me so can't comment, another option might be to investigate PCI-X cards as a number of those will run in a normal PCI slot.

Bigsy · 15 Aug 2006 at 19:28

ajm said:
Plenty to look through Here

Are any of them real hardware raid? Most certainly don't look like it to me.

Thanks rpstewart the adaptec card I was looking at is pci-x which works in pci.

Think I'll give software raid 5 a bash first, seems a bit complicated but maybe worth a go as speed isn;t a huge factor at present, more the redundancy.

JonnyT · 15 Aug 2006 at 19:51

Why not take a look at the Promise range of cards? They may not be that cheap but they are good quality and they come with decent management software & are certainly a step up from software raid.

From looking at the site, the Promise TX4310 looks like your best bet - link

Vietnow · 17 Aug 2006 at 03:00

Hardware RAID means that the card has its own hardware for calculating parity bits and memory for the card.
Software RAID is dependant on the CPU/MEMORY subsystems inside your computer, on board motherboards and cheap add in cards are always software based.