RAID Controllers/Cards: 6Gb/s vs 12Gb/s RAID

stringsonfire

stringsonfire

stringsonfire

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Would someone mind highlighting the difference here? I've been looking at 8-drive cards (two SAS ports), and plan to use SATA III Hard Drives, not SSDs. Is there any advantage to a 12Gb/s card here?

Thanks!
 
using sata hdd's with a 12gb card wont give you any advantage in speed, though it mite be worth buying if the price between 6gb and 12gb isn't that great.

i recently bought a HP 12gb sas raid card as the price difference wasn't that different from the 6gb version. at least it would future proof u a bit if you wanted to upgraded later.

how are you connecting the hdd's a shelf?
 
That'll be a DAS shelf. Means you can effectively have external drives via sas.

12Gb SAS is mostly overkill unless you are using SSDs. Though it is better for redundancy and speed. 6Gb is dual 3Gb where 12Gb is actually dual 12Gb.
 
Got it. I'll stick to the 6Gbps cards then, there's a fair price gap on the LSI cards I was looking at. A lot of cheap availability directly from China. If I opt for software RAID of some kind, are any Hardware Card features still useful? Caching, battery, etc?
 
I assume you are using the RAID card for just additional drives? Might be worth looking at a SATA/SAS How as it'll be cheaper.

If you want to stick with a RAID card sometimes get JBOD mode or you can just use single disk RAID0.

Caching etc. Should still be useful but it will be dependent on what you are doing! At work we've got some cards with caching disabled as certain setups run better without it.
 
Out of interest, what did you go for?

I'm currently looking at possibly an Adaptec 6405 or an LSI Megaraid 9260-4i to replace a couple of Highpoint cards I have. But it seems the general consensus is unless you go for a card with hardware caching and a battery backup, then you might as well stick with a software raid card or just plain software raid.
 
In the end I didn't - I decided I couldn't justify the cost of new hard drives, they're still too expensive. I also didn't want to rely on a RAID card. Not very portable. This is what I would have used:

Case: Lian Li PC-Q26B
PSU: Seasonic SS-520FL2
Motherboard: ASRock Rack E3C224D4I-14S (Flashed with JBOD firmware)
CPU: Intel E3-1231 v3
RAM: 2 x Kingston 8GB ValueRAM PC3-12800
HDD: 4 (or 8) x 6TB WD Red drives, in software RAID 10
SSD: 256GB Samsung 830 I have spare
 
Fair enough, I think I'm going to convert my RAID6 array (RR2710) to RAID10 and see how I get on with that performance wise. If that still performs poorly then I'll look at changing the card again. Shame the RR2310 isnt compatible with Windows 10, as its been absolutely rock solid for me.
 
Just a quick one chaps, Amazon sometimes have rebranded LSI Megaraid cards on for cheap as chips. I picked up a LSI 2208 based raid card which was Fujitsu (I've seen IBM ones on there as well) branded for £70 - uses all the LSI software / firmware etc.
 
faxfan said:
Just a quick one chaps, Amazon sometimes have rebranded LSI Megaraid cards on for cheap as chips. I picked up a LSI 2208 based raid card which was Fujitsu (I've seen IBM ones on there as well) branded for £70 - uses all the LSI software / firmware etc.
Click to expand...

Do you know what the Fujitsu model number is?

I know the IBM ones require flashing to LSI firmware, which i'd rather not do as it then becomes a non standard config.
 
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