PCI RAID cards
- Thread starter ChrisD.
- Start date
rpstewart's the best guy to advise you here, but my 2p - highpoint rocketraid 2310 four port solution. It's really sweet in read and write, on my 3*320 R5. Dunno if ocuk sell them anymore though.
fwiw: vista64U picked it up on an update immediately after a port from winxp32.
fwiw: vista64U picked it up on an update immediately after a port from winxp32.
It really depends on what level of performance you are looking for, if its just for storage, a cheapish pci one would do fine for a couple of drives and can be picked up for less than £20. However if you're looking for speed and redundancy i.e. a faster raid 5 card, then you can be spending a few hundred.
For the multi port cards, they generally mount the plugs on the end edge of them; I've found a pretty crappy picture, but it illustates my point,
For the multi port cards, they generally mount the plugs on the end edge of them; I've found a pretty crappy picture, but it illustates my point,
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Aside from price it seems you have a another issue to deal with - the PCI bus; which is limited to 127.2MB/s.
Even if you got a really fast card to go with your 10,000 rpm hdds, you'll probably hit a bandwidth limitation after adding your 2nd drive.
Even if you got a really fast card to go with your 10,000 rpm hdds, you'll probably hit a bandwidth limitation after adding your 2nd drive.
If you're raiding them for speed, it might be worth putting your other hard discs onto the pci bus card. As raptors will easily hit the maximum speed after 2-3 cards in raid. Alternatively a pci-e card will work full all cards and not limit the maximum speed. They're available in many flavours, number of ports and price, and you may find one to be faster than using the onboard s-ata ports. Personally, thats where my knowledge ends, but I've seen pci-e x16 cards with 24+ports selling and with a multitude of raid levels supported.
From looking at a few reviews I'd be tempted to recommend a Highpoint RocketRaid, but the particular model etc is really dependant on your exact needs, and you might find youself paying towards £200 for them. However with 4 raptors in raid you might find it to be the best puchase you've ever done.
But as said before rpstewart is the one who knows and has used them
Hope that helps
edit: guess it might be like a floppy drive/sound card as you can always just put them in your new rig, a one off payment I guess
Another alternative might be to put your 4 raptors on the motherboards RAID controller, then replace your other drives with higher capacity ones, and/or external drives. This may actually work out cheaper than getting a PCI-E raid controller and certainly 'neater'.
^^ Good point. I'll have the four Raptors and I have two storage drives, a WD Caviar 250GB and a Seagate 500GB. I had the Seagate in an external enclosure connected via eSATA and I didn't really like the driver that was being used. Explorer used to randomly crash and the PC didn't "feel" right.
Soldato
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2x raid0 sets would be good
Well other option is to sell the lot and get a few 750wdaaks drives as they seem to be pretty good bang/buck storage drives atm.
Personally I've found raids with 3+drives to have very limiting returns, but still found a conciderable difference between 2-3
Personally I've found raids with 3+drives to have very limiting returns, but still found a conciderable difference between 2-3
RAID performance will differ hugely depending on bandwidth available, the raid controller being used and the RAID level. As mentioned above, an onboard controller probably isn't going to scale that well past 2/3 drives.
If I were you, I'd keep 2 of the raptors and set them up as RAID 0 using the on-board controller. Sell whatever is left and get some Hitachi 750's. You'll end up with a v.fast primary logical drive for windows/programs/games and tons of storage space on the 750's. Hopefully it won't have cost you anything overall either!
If I were you, I'd keep 2 of the raptors and set them up as RAID 0 using the on-board controller. Sell whatever is left and get some Hitachi 750's. You'll end up with a v.fast primary logical drive for windows/programs/games and tons of storage space on the 750's. Hopefully it won't have cost you anything overall either!