I'm amazed the H200 isn't getting more love. AFAIK it's PCI-E v2 (can check later if anyone is interested) and SATA III. The Dell firmware is dreadful and it's a little tricky to flash, but will take LSI firmware. Well worth the effort for <£100 new.
Recommened RAID controller?
- Thread starter Toms88
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Soldato
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Please for the love of God make that a RAID6...
I believe it can do 5 with the LSI firmware, but is apparently not really up to the job. I only needed to flash mine to a Dell 6GBP SaS HBA, but it will take the LSI 9211-8i firmware. It's a slightly risky process, but I didn't have any problems, plenty of guides around via google.
edit - correction, the LSI 9211-8i is 0,1,10 only, so no RAID5.
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Soldato
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I intended to, but as I have double backups I don't see the need.
Be interesting to see if it will take the LSi 9240-8i firmware then as the M1015 takes both. The 9240-8i does raid 5 but it is fake / software raid 5 and requires a feature key. It also has no capacity for a cache or BBU making it slow and potentially suseptible to the raid 5 write hole problems.
Anotehr option is using RoFS (Raid on File Systems) solutions where pooling, mirroring various files across multiple drives etc is handled in software on top of the OS. There are a number of solutions available, some free, some not, and they are fairly good if the space is to be used by a single supported OS. One irritation though is that the data is spread across multiple drives and if one drive fails, you need to try and work out what files you have lost (if not mirrored). I had this with my media drive and a thumbnail here was missing and a movie file there and a picture here and a mp3 track there. Made it a right pain to try and work out what I had to re-rip from my collections in order to fill in the gaps. I would hope that some of the solutions would keep an index so you could just pull out a report but I am not aware of any doing this (haven't recently checked though).
RB