Recommend a harware raid controller

Dihi Doctor · 28 May 2009 at 10:13

Hi all,

I am fed up with using my motherboard's software raid. It causes hassle each time I rebuild my PC (most Linux distros do not support it out of the box).

Hence I would like a recommendation for a hardware raid controller. Ideally to support 4 SATA-II disks and under £50.

I do not know if this is possible - there seems to be some massive variation in price! Are the cheaper ones software raid?

Thanks in advance
Jon

avatar12m · 28 May 2009 at 11:47

i was considering it also but what are the benefits ? how much fast would they be etc? plus are there utilities so if you want to go from 4 raid zero to raid 0+1 without formatting etc.

miniyazz · 28 May 2009 at 11:48

I believe the cheaper ones are hardware RAID. But they won't have an onboard processor, and perhaps no cache. This isn't going to be a problem unless you want a RAID level that needs the processing power (RAID5/6, for example, in which case the card would use the CPU to do the calculations, slowing down the rest of the system). You should be able to move the card and hard drives to a new system with no hassle other than installing the drivers for the card, but don't take that as gospel as I've never actually done it with a cheapo card..

jbloggs · 28 May 2009 at 13:46

A cheap 4 port SATA RAID card for under £50 will simply be a software implementation of whatever RAID level the card specifies, ie. as already stated there will be no onboard processor or ram, however for RAID 0 & 1, this will be fine and will take no performance hit, however for RAID 5 & 6 a true hardware card is needed to give decent write values where the parity calculations are made by the obbaord processor of the card, and not the CPU...for such a card you will be paying £200, even a true hardware 2 port SATA RAID card will be around £130 or more.

Maybe something like This may do what you want...

miniyazz · 28 May 2009 at 13:50

jbloggs said:
Maybe something like This may do what you want...

Once you're at that price level you may as well get something like the PERC 5/i though. Not the fastest onboard processor but supports up to 8 drives and RAID 5 if you ever decided to go down that root.

JonJ678 · 28 May 2009 at 13:56

If you run linux, why not stick with software raid but through mdadm? It's managed by the os directly, and I think the vast majority of distributions support it. It's proved astonishingly resilient, my raid 5 has been through 3 motherboards now, including a change from intel chipset to nvidia with amd.

Dihi Doctor · 4 Jun 2009 at 14:15

Thanks for the replies. I currently use dmraid, since it allows me to use software raid under both Linux and Windows.

Looks like a hardware raid card that will make the raid transparent to Windows and Linux is out of my budget.

Guess I'll be sticking with dmraid for now then