Raid 5? Adaptec 2410SA

mattpc · 6 Sep 2007 at 10:54

Right I currently have an Abit AN7 running a mirrored raid array with two discs. I have now come by 4x larger discs which are matched and want to run a striped and mirrored array. Cue Raid 5? To facilitate this I plan on buying an Adaptec 2410SA as the Nvidia onboard controller only has two ports. I want the adaptec card 2nd hand as new they are very expensive. The reason I want the larger array is increased storage, faster access but maintaining some security if one drive fails. The reason I am not just changing the motherboard is because I don't have the funds to buy another copy of vista, mobo, cpu, graphics and memory. Therefore I intend to add a controller card, get the best CPU I can for the board and use the new hard disks. The reason I want striped and mirrored is because the PC is my business PC containing important data. I used to have it in striped mode and enjoyed the better performance. I now need striped and mirrored.

Thoughts and tips anyone? I will be running it on my vista business liscence.

Btw the eventual plan will be to move this PC to server duties (when I can afford a new PC) so the array will then be put to use running server 2003 or similar. Then I will get a new superfly workstation probably running raid 0 and data will be kept on the server.

rpstewart · 6 Sep 2007 at 11:06

Firstly do you want RAID5 or striped mirroring (RAID 10 or 0+1)? They're different things.

That card will give you hardware RAID5 for good write speed but it's a PCI-X card so for full speed operation you'll need a board with 64bit/66MHz PCI-X slots which the AN7 doesn't have. Now the card *should* run in a normal 32bit/33MHz PCI slot but it'll be severely bandwidth limited (133MB/s max shared with all PCI devices). It'll be faster than your current mirrored array but if you go RAID5 you'll lose a fair chunk of the potential performance.

There are other options which might be better but you need to decide if you want RAID5 or 10 before I can advise further.

mattpc · 6 Sep 2007 at 11:08

ok so RAID10 sounds good because what I want is striped and mirrored. What card would I need for this?

rpstewart · 6 Sep 2007 at 11:28

If you don't want RAID5 then the range of controllers really opens up because RAID10 doesn't need any extra processing power from the controller so the cheap ones perform pretty much the same as the expensive ones. The likes of the Adaptec AAR-1420SA or one of the PCI Highpoint cards should be fine.

The 133Mb/s bus limitation isn't going to be as much of a problem with RAID10 as it would be with RAID5 since you'll only be reading from a pair of drives rather than three so you might see a bit of clipping of sustained transfers but not by a lot.

mattpc · 6 Sep 2007 at 11:49

have been looking at the MRI-SATA/4CR for about £38. Just trying to establish if this works ok with vista.

bugger it doesnt!!!

mattpc · 6 Sep 2007 at 12:27

Now looking at Highpoint Rocket Raid 1740LF 4 Channel SATAII PCI RAID Card

which is about £80. The MRI card I was previously looking at has a vista RTM driver available but I'm not sure it's worth the hassle of trying to use that.

rpstewart · 6 Sep 2007 at 13:18

Highpoint driver support is usually pretty good, I've got a 2320 running under Vista 64 with no problems whatsoever.

mattpc · 6 Sep 2007 at 13:40

I've gone for the Highpoint RocketRAID RR1810ALF PCI in the end. Hoping to pick it up later today. Thanks for your help. I hope I won't be on again later asking about how to set it up!!! Should be ok as I've had arrays before.

rpstewart · 6 Sep 2007 at 13:55

Don't worry about coming back looking for help.

One quick tip before you start - the onboard BIOS on the 2320 was a bit of a pain and ended up loading too much into RAM to the point that Windows wouldn't recognise any arrays on it. If you run into a similar problem hit "End" on the keyboard while the Highpoint BIOS is displayed and it should prevent the BIOS loading to RAM and allow the array to be recognised. Post back here and I'll dig out the permanent fix instructions.

mattpc · 8 Sep 2007 at 11:21

I'm liking my raid10. Just one question. When you create the array it defaults to 64k blocks. Is this the ultimate size to use or would larger or smaller have been better?

rpstewart · 10 Sep 2007 at 08:35

The best block size depends on the size of files on the array. If you're working mainly with big files then a larger block size will mean the controller doesn't have to join as many together whereas if you're working with a lot of smaller files then a smaller block size means less wasted data is retrieved. There isn't a lot of empirical data out there to say how much of a difference the block size makes so I tend to go with 64K as a decent compromise..