Raid Card fpr a Microserver N54L

citizen0100 · 6 Jan 2015 at 11:14

Hi,

Does anyone know where I can get a resonabily priced Raid card for my HP Microserver N54L?

I'm really hoping to spend under £100.

Thanks

Little_Crow · 6 Jan 2015 at 11:27

What RAID level are you looking to use?
The onboard connections support RAID 0 and 1 - so you're all set if this is what you're looking to achieve.

You may also want to have a look in the Microserver mega thread in the 'Servers and Enterprise Solutions' sub forum - lots of info in there

skyripper · 6 Jan 2015 at 11:44

If I was doing that I'd dook at second hand PERC cards from Dell.
the PERC 5 are fine for mechanical drives, not fast enough for SSDs though.

citizen0100 · 6 Jan 2015 at 16:02

Hi All,

As luck will have it I've just bought a P410 but it doent have a battery, do I need one?

Thanks for all your help.

Armageus · 6 Jan 2015 at 16:16

citizen0100 said:
Hi All,

As luck will have it I've just bought a P410 but it doent have a battery, do I need one?

Thanks for all your help.

Only 100% necessary if you are doing any kind of online migration/expansion. You "shouldn't" necessarily enable the write cache without it, but there is an option to iirc - depends on what performance you need / how critical the data is.

Little_Crow · 6 Jan 2015 at 17:29

As Armageus said really.
With cache on a RAID card it'll tell the OS the data is written once it's in cache, then it actually writes to disk. It essentially gives a nice performance boost. If you lose power to the card and that data is still in cache, and you have no battery - it's gone.

If that data was the middle of an OS update the implications could be bad - it just depends.

To repeat my earlier question, what level of RAID are you looking to achieve?
If you're looking for RAID0, 1 or 10 you could probably disable cache without too much of a performance hit.
For RAID 5 or 6 the P410 requires both 256MB cache and the BBWC - so you will need the battery.

#######
Just checked the quickspecs for the P410 and it looks like you have to have a battery for write back caching - so our points were moot for the card you bought.
The cache will give you a boost for reads, but it won't be available for writes, where it helps the most.