Raid Card PCI

mattyj1085 · 21 Sep 2010 at 19:10

I need a cheap PCI raid card to connect my 2 new samsung f4's to to use in my server pc.

Does anyone know of a cheap one just to use in raid 0 that will work with the 2TB drives?

jbloggs · 21 Sep 2010 at 20:08

I would look on the bay (or OcUK for sale forum) for a SiI3112/3114/3124 2/4 port PCI-(X) SATA RAID card...should only cost you a few £s...

EDIT: My apologies, for some reason the "raid 0" bit did not sink in and I just thought you wanted a PCI SATA (RAID) card for extra ports...

rpstewart · 21 Sep 2010 at 23:22

mattyj1085 said:
I need a cheap PCI raid card to connect my 2 new samsung f4's to to use in my server pc.

Does anyone know of a cheap one just to use in raid 0 that will work with the 2TB drives?

There's no point in using RAID0 with those drives on a plain PCI card. The card will be limited to 133MB/s due to the bus, the drives will read at close to that on their own so running RAID0 isn't worth it.

ubersonic · 22 Sep 2010 at 08:41

/agree, if your server is running windows server 2000/2003/2008 or vista/7 you can just plug the drives in and format the as a software raid1 partition which will work better than raid from a motherboard or cheap pci card anyway

mattyj1085 · 22 Sep 2010 at 09:14

I was just going to run them in raid so I get just one volume in windows thats all, I dont need any redundancy as I have a total copy of all the data on another array

mattyj1085 · 22 Sep 2010 at 10:40

rpstewart said:
There's no point in using RAID0 with those drives on a plain PCI card. The card will be limited to 133MB/s due to the bus, the drives will read at close to that on their own so running RAID0 isn't worth it.

What would I need to take advantage on them a PCI ex raid card?

ubersonic · 22 Sep 2010 at 11:11

mattyj1085 said:
I was just going to run them in raid so I get just one volume in windows thats all, I dont need any redundancy as I have a total copy of all the data on another array

ahh my bad thought you said raid1, well you can make a raid0 partition with windows software raid too and its faster than motherboard raid or a cheap raid card but you cant boot from it

tho it would save the cost of the card, do you need fast boot times on a server?

rpstewart · 22 Sep 2010 at 11:16

Do you have a free PCIe slot? You can pick up PCIe 1x cards for the same kind of price as plain PCI, one of those will give you more bandwidth to the disks (250MB/s).

mattyj1085 · 22 Sep 2010 at 11:32

rpstewart said:
Do you have a free PCIe slot? You can pick up PCIe 1x cards for the same kind of price as plain PCI, one of those will give you more bandwidth to the disks (250MB/s).

Cheers, I don't at the min its a old pc with P4 but im trying to cobble some cheapish parts together to upgrade it so hopefully I will have soon!

Cheers

mattyj1085 · 22 Sep 2010 at 11:36

ubersonic said:
ahh my bad thought you said raid1, well you can make a raid0 partition with windows software raid too and its faster than motherboard raid or a cheap raid card but you cant boot from it tho it would save the cost of the card, do you need fast boot times on a server?

I tried this but it was very slow I haven't got enoough spare sata ports on the motherboard so I had them connected to a Via 3 port pci sata card and then did a software raid in windows but transfer rates were shocking, you couldn't even play a blue ray rip with out it juddering all over

PC is running Win XP pro if thats any help

ubersonic · 22 Sep 2010 at 11:50

mattyj1085 said:
I tried this but it was very slow I haven't got enoough spare sata ports on the motherboard so I had them connected to a Via 3 port pci sata card and then did a software raid in windows but transfer rates were shocking, you couldn't even play a blue ray rip with out it juddering all over

PC is running Win XP pro if thats any help

well in that case a pci sata raid card would have even worse performance, Id suggest a pci-e sata raid card like the guy above said