Recommend a Hardware PCI-E 4+Port RAID5 Controller!

Burned_Alive

Burned_Alive

Burned_Alive

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Looking to setup a Raid5 array with 4 500gb or 750gb drives, ideally it would be hardware based (so onboard parity processing), but if these are ridiculously expensive then a standard solution will do, what do you reckon? Its basically to be used for non system, non critical storage
 
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You'll be limited to 133MB/s reads which is still better than a single drive but whether that's a problem will depend on what you need the array for.
 
Right now im looking at the Highpoint RocketRaid RR3510LF, bit steep at £190 but seems to be the best solution, although seems i will have to sacrifice the second PCI-E 16x lane in order to run it (I have an Asus P5E).
 
What kinda budget do you have?

3Ware's 9650SE is a 4 port PCI-E card that does what you need, however you're looking at about £190/200

Or there is a HighPoint RocketRaid 2310 which is PCI-E and offers Raid 5 etc however it doesn't have any onboard processing

Thanks,

Scott C
 
jbloggs said:
The reason I suggested the Adaptec PCI option was simply because a PCI-E/X alternative (hardware) RAID cont will be around £200...

If you are willing to spend that, also have a look at the Areca ARC-1210...I had the ARC-1110 (PCI-X) which was a very nice SATA RAID cont....
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Fair enough, im really just looking for advice on the best overall solution, like is there really any point spending £200 on the card, if there's only a minor performance benefit over a budget card, etc
 
Its basically to be used for non system, non critical storage
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£200 is a lot of money for a non system, non critical storage volume.....

a cheap (PCI) solution, an Adaptec AAR-2410SA of a certain auction site...
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These are proper hardware RAID contollers, albeit PCI, which as already stated will still give you a data transfer rate of (up to) 133MB/s, which still is half decent...

Maybe someone else has another suggestion.
 
Yeah i'm umm and ahhing really, particularly for the price those seem to be going for...... think i might try one and see how it goes, then trade up if needs be
 
I got a second hand Perc5/i on <popular online auction site> for £20, two fanout cables to let me use up to 8 sata drives on it cost me another £20 - but still it's absolutely stonking value. I did need to modify it a bit as they don't come with metal backplates, so i had to scavenge one from an old pci card i had lying around before i could secure it to my case.
I get at least 90MB/s writes to it to a three drive RAID5 array, and that's over a gigabit network so probably much more than that.
If someone can suggest a free benchmark to test write times, I'll run it.
 
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