SATA/Raid addon card, ideas please?

broona

broona

broona

Soldato
Joined
28 Aug 2006
Posts
3,110
Location
Hexham
Currently got 5 HDD's (4 normal, 1 SSD), and I've ran out of connectors on the motherboard to add any more.

Tried a couple of cheapo Via 2 port cards, and they were either rubbish or not recognised at all.

Probably looking for a cheap'ish 4 port card, RAID could be nice to add some redundancy, but not essential, any recommendations please?
 
broona said:
All of my HDD's, including the SSD, are SATA-II, and any connection type would do, as long as it's reliable.
Click to expand...

you can pick up some cheapo cards from ebay there lots to choose from 2port 4 port. some support raid some dont.

if you want to spend a little extra id recomend the Dell Perc5i supports up to 8 drives has dedicated 256mb ram but they require forced cooling which means you must have a dedicated fan for it as it runs hot they can be picked up for as little as £50! supports raid 0,1,5,10.
 
Mr.V said:
you can pick up some cheapo cards from ebay there lots to choose from 2port 4 port. some support raid some dont.

if you want to spend a little extra id recomend the Dell Perc5i supports up to 8 drives has dedicated 256mb ram but they require forced cooling which means you must have a dedicated fan for it as it runs hot they can be picked up for as little as £50! supports raid 0,1,5,10.
Click to expand...

Tried a couple of Ebay cheapo specials, and they either weren't recognised or just didn't work properly, I'll take a look at the Dell, cheers. :D
 
broona said:
Tried a couple of Ebay cheapo specials, and they either weren't recognised or just didn't work properly, I'll take a look at the Dell, cheers. :D
Click to expand...

no worries, bear the cooling in mind as most people forget most people point a standard 80mm fan to keep it cool. theres some good deals going on the HP Smart Array P400 again can handle 8 sata drives but without the added headache of worrying about airflow, its worth considering they pop up on ebay at good prices if your willing to stretch your budget that lil bit further

keep me posted
 
Mr.V said:
no worries, bear the cooling in mind as most people forget most people point a standard 80mm fan to keep it cool. theres some good deals going on the HP Smart Array P400 again can handle 8 sata drives but without the added headache of worrying about airflow, its worth considering they pop up on ebay at good prices if your willing to stretch your budget that lil bit further

keep me posted
Click to expand...

Many thanks for your help, I'll scour ebay and see what I can find. :)
 
Just bought a HP P400 Smart Array Controller with backup battery off Ebay for £40, see if it does what I want, if not, sure I'll get my money back on it.
 
broona said:
Just bought a HP P400 Smart Array Controller with backup battery off Ebay for £40, see if it does what I want, if not, sure I'll get my money back on it.
Click to expand...

£40!!!!??? :eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

BARGAIN! well done mate :D im jealous lol

p.s. forgot to mention if your using it on a INtel based motherboard you will need to cover pins 5+6 on the raid card before plugging it in to the pci-express port something to do with the intel bus causes it to hang sometimes.
 
Last edited:
broona said:
Just bought a HP P400 Smart Array Controller with backup battery off Ebay for £40, see if it does what I want, if not, sure I'll get my money back on it.
Click to expand...

Yep, that is a nice price for the unit. You may want to check what condition the battery is in when you get it.

As the P400 is a SAS controller (not a native SATA controller) you will need to get the correct cables to link the drives to it. I believe the unit uses the SFF-8484 connectors so you will need two sets of SFF-8484 -> 4x sata cables which can be had cheaply on ebay.

The controller is PCIe 1.0(a ??) so supports 2GB/s over 8 drives but it only supports SATA I (150MB/s). This should be fine for all mechanical hard drives but a little slow for SSDs. The controller also seems only to support up to 1TB drives by the spec sheet here. I am sure someone can confirm this though.

LSI 1068 based controllers are usually worth a punt. The 3081E-R, Dell 6ir or the IBM BR10 or various others. These units use the newer SFF8087 -> 4x SATA cables (apart from the Dell which still uses the SFF-848), certainly support 2TB drives (I have had some hanging off my old ones) and work very well. The LSI 1068 chipset supports SATA II, specs here.

If you want to move to the current generation then you could do worse than look at the LSI 9211 which is a 6Gb/s per channel (x8 channels, one for each device) and is PCIe 2.0 compliant meaning it cat push upto 4GB/s to the motherboard. Just as a tip, the IBM M1015 is based on the LSI 2008 SAS chipset (like the LSI 9211) and can sometimes be found on ebay and a certain on-line book shop for silly prices. If you then reflash the cards with the LSI 2008 firmware you end up with what is essentially a 9211. The caveat is that the flash software does not work on all motherboards (google flashing IBM M1015 for lots of advice). At worst the M1015 is still a nice SAS controller. There is one in the US selling for around US$70 on that book shop. I got two for just over US$100 each and have them in my ESXi 20 drive server.

Having a google for 'Home Server' should bring up a few sites with info on stuff like this if you want to dig a bit further.

RB
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom