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

stringsonfire · 28 Feb 2015 at 21:30

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!

stringsonfire · 4 Mar 2015 at 20:13

What do you mean 'a shelf'?

stringsonfire · 7 Mar 2015 at 11:15

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?

stringsonfire · 21 Mar 2015 at 20:11

Ok, will probably ditch caching then. I'm still unclear on what JBOD is - do the disks appear individually to the OS?

stringsonfire · 22 Mar 2015 at 11:53

Got it. I thought JBOD might be something like RAID0 with various disk sizes. So IT mode on LSI cards is JBOD?

stringsonfire · 22 Mar 2015 at 20:17

Perfect, thanks!

stringsonfire · 22 Aug 2015 at 14:01

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