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

Pandobear said:
With the increasing use of home servers you would think that one of the manufacturers would come out with 8 or 12 port sata cards on PCIe.

As I say, I am surprised that Silicon Image or Highpoint are not marketing high port count sata cards.
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Highpoint do a 16 port 2340LF but needs an PCI-E x8 slot.
 
Highpoint do a 16 port 2340LF but needs an PCI-E x8 slot.
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Yes that one is quite reaonable compared with other raid cards. however they are really expensive when compared with motherboard onboard raid, where the whole board cost less than £100 on average. I have found the Supermicro's SAT2-MV8, which are around £70 for an 8 port card, but driver support seems to be poor.
 
It would be interesting to see some benchmarks comparing the hardware raid cards against software cards, using dual or quad core processors. I remember looking at the bechmarks for the Silicon Image 3114, with software raid 5, against the hardware raid cards of the time, and it did really well, and was a tiny fraction of the cost.

I am gonna get a couple of the supermicro cards, because the Adaptec AAR 21610SA that I am using totally sucks. My server, which happens to have two PCI-X slots, is running Windows Server 2008 anyways, which provides software raid 5 itself, so I will see how they perform and report back.

I would have liked to try the Perc 5i, but the worlds supply seems to have dried up.
 
marscay said:
they use multilane connectors, cost about a tenner each for a ML -> 4 sata cable.
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Just bought one of these cards from the bay, any chance you can link me to the cables I will need to get m8.
If you can't link can you mail me the info pls.
 
Got the HighPoint RR2300 up and running with with 4x750gb Samsung F1s in RAID5 seems to be managing average 122mb/s read/write speeds with a 13ms access time, pretty happy with that!
 
I am gonna get a couple of the supermicro cards, because the Adaptec AAR 21610SA that I am using totally sucks. My server, which happens to have two PCI-X slots, is running Windows Server 2008 anyways, which provides software raid 5 itself, so I will see how they perform and report back.
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I have installed the two Supermicro cards, they use the same drivers as the AAR2429SA, by the way, and get the following benchmark results using the cards in two PCI-X slots on a Intel 975 chipset board, 4 GB RAM and running Windows Server 2008

Buffered read : 547.48 MB/sec
Sequential read : 599.67 MB/sec
Random read: 87.39 MB/sec
Buffered write : 66.10 MB/sec
Sequential write: 61.61 Mb/sec
Random write: 31.81 MB/sec

You can certainly notice the lack of an XOR processor for those write speeds, but for my usage, as a media file server the read speed is more important, and this double the speed of 2 raptors in raid 0. I would be interested to see what the figures for the Perc 5i are, just for reference.
 
the Perc 5/LSI 8408e has a cap at ~300-350MB/s with Raid 5 writes which i have hit with only 5 of the WD 1TB GP drives in Raid 5, it's a great performer for the money unless you buy one new :p but not up there with the Areca's and Highpoint cards with the newest IOP341.

you're absolutely correct however, for home storage/media server no-one really needs bleeding edge speed .....reliability is far more important which is why i went with the Green Power drives.
 
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