RAID5 SFF-8087 Controller

[Captain Fizz]

Down to 4

OK, what I have currently:
PERC 5/i running RAID5 with 3 x WD20EARS.
The drives have been fine, no problems considering they are 'green'.

What I'm moving to:
RAID array going to a HP MicroServer.
So - Need a half height card.

After spending many days hunting for reviews / reading forums etc I have come up with 4 cards.

• 3mware 9650SE-4LPML
• LSI 8704EM2
• Areca ARC-1210
• Adaptec ASR-5405

One caveat - The BBU for the 3mware seems to be significantly cheaper than any of the rest.
Required:
SFF 8087 connector
RAID5 write performance to be comparable to PERC 5/i
Low Profile

Wanted:
BBU available and not extortionate
Ideally anyone who has run 'green' drives on these controllers
HDD LED Headers would be nice

So - if you were buying a RAID Card for them and wanted decent performance, would you go with one of these 4?
If so, which one of them?
And if not - Would you suggest a cheaper card?

One thing to note about the Adaptec is that it's dual core oO
Probably overkill but seemed interesting none the less.

Also there are issues with the PERC on an Intel mobo - None of these cards have issues running on non-server hardware?

Thanks for any tips / advise. Seems not a lot of people within google use these for home setups much.

 

[Pandobear]

I would definitely write to each of manufactures and ensure that the cards will work with advanced format drives if you want to go with one of these hardware cards. I had lots of grief with a Promise card under RAID5 (was fine with RAID6) and 2TB drives.

Not sure about the BBUs, they are pretty expensive, compared with a UPS, which gives much better protection.

Do you really need the write speeds that a hardware card delivers? If you are writing across a network then anything above 150MB/sec is overkill. The lian-li card gives a type of raid 5, and is really cheap, but write speeds will be limited. It might even be worthwhile trying a silicon image 3114 or similar to see the write speeds on them.

 

[Captain Fizz]

Planning teaming 2 x NIC's to give 200Mb/s.
If the integrated broadcom NIC will team with an additional one.

If not then 100Mb/s write speeds would be the minimum.
Which would then drop the price - In fact, I'm prob better testing the broadcom solution before plunging for the card.

Been reading more reviews, the 9650SE is an old card... Still nice performance tho.

Have a UPS, just in case the UPS runs out when I'm not home
Unless I make a trigger for my PC to shutdown the other box first before it shuts down.

But yep - See if they'll team first... /googles some more