PCIe RAID Card - Spec Me

Django x2 · 28 Nov 2013 at 12:46

Something for my home media server. It's an aging unit (around 5 years old) and has PCIe2 which is free. I'd like a RAID card in there if possible (and suitable).

Something under £100 would be nice

Stelly · 28 Nov 2013 at 12:51

how many HDDs are you looking at dude? What RAID setup?

Stelly

TheBiznes · 28 Nov 2013 at 13:28

I myself would stick to more recognized cards such as Adaptec, Arecca, LSI.

Adaptec 3405 might suit for the price you quoted or 3805.

Stelly · 28 Nov 2013 at 13:30

Adaptec are good cards, I have an Intel one, but it cost me a fortune

How about SATA3? Do you need a card that supports HDD over 2TB??

Stelly

Django x2 · 28 Nov 2013 at 13:37

No. I am swapping out for probably 3 x 960Gb SSDs to start with (or HDDs, but I need it to be as quiet as possible).

skyripper · 28 Nov 2013 at 13:40

I wouldnt touch that first card with a bargepole. If you're using raid, your data is important to you.

As for the second card, I've never seen a hardware toggle to choose raid level! Its normally done at the management software level.

Second-hand Arrecca, LSI, Adaptec or DELL Perc cards are where I would be looking.

Django x2 · 28 Nov 2013 at 13:54

I'll have to compromise somewhere as I can't find one that is PCIe 1, battery, ram and covers RAID 5

rpstewart · 28 Nov 2013 at 18:13

Can you confirm what type of slot it needs to fit in, it's not clear from the above. However given the 2 cards linked you're looking at PCIe 1x. If so then running 3 x SSD is pointless, you'll be bottlenecked by the PCIe slot, if it's 2.0 then you'll get 500MB/s, half that for v1.0.

Django x2 · 30 Nov 2013 at 10:11

Thanks guys. It will defo have to be PCIe 1 at the mo, but this does all form part of a larger system upgrade so I will have to suck up the SSD performance issue whilst this is being done. None of the SSDs will be a system disk, just the storage.