Decent affordable hardware RAID5 card?

[GeX]

Hi all.

Currently have a pair of 1tb drives for my storage needs and a pair of 300gb drives in RAID0 for my OS etc.

My onboard SATA controller is failing (will 'loose' a drive if i do sustained transfers to it). It has got me a bit paranoid about loosing data now.

What I (think I) want to do is get another 1TB drive and a hardware RAID card and setup a RAID5 array. There is a lot of cards out there, and there seems to be many ex server ones on ebay but after reading into them I find out that they can be fussy and only work in certain motherboards or will not support arrays over certain sizes.

Anyone suggest any cards to look into, and or sugges why my RAID5 idea might be altogether a poor plan?

 

[AbsenceJam]

The Dell Perc 5 cards are cheap and decent.

RAID is not backup, all manner of other things can still cause you to lose your data. It only keeps you going when there is a physical failure.

 

[GeX]

i know RAID isn't a backup, and anything critical is backed up elsewhere. I'm just looking to remove the fear of a disk failure!

I think i was looking at a Perc 5 card and heard it was fussy re the motherboard, and am sure i saw a really low array size limit - but it was a post from a long way back

 

[Zarf]

I'm happily running a Perc 5/i, with 8x1TB disks in RAID 5.
Performance numbers here

Not sure what you mean about low array size limit, As long as you're running in GPT the sky's the limit, I could replace my drives with 2TB versions no problem.

Motherboard wise I didn't have to do anything with my nForce3 board, If you have an intel board you just need to put a bit of tape over some pins.
If you get one you will need some active cooling on there though, like an old 40mm fan, as they come out from server cases that have forced air. You'll also want a PCI backplate for the same reason - I scavenged mine from an old graphics card, but you can buy them on a popular auction site.


I'd definitely look into building a proper NAS server, like I did, having several drives adds quite a lot of weight noise and heat to your PC. It also provides makes a convenient server box that you can leave on 24/7 for downloads or anything else.

If I was building one today I'd probably skip on the Perc 5 to save myself some money and build an Openfiler or FreeNAS box, Performance is limited by my Gigabit card (although I get relatively good utilisation and around 100MB/s to windows servers). It would be a bit simpler when it comes to upgrading the individual drives (at some point i'm going to need to go to 2TB or better drives, which is looking to be troublesome), and has some nice advanced features. I'd then want to have a separate physical server and put multiple VM's on it over iSCSI for my server apps.

 

[GeX]

thanks for that Zarf