What Raid controller card?

Mint_Sauce

Mint_Sauce

Mint_Sauce

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My onboad Raid 5 (P35) sometimes goes crazy and decides it wants to do a verification and repair. It doesn't happen often and it's usually if Windows doesn't shut down properly and I have to switch it off manually.

Anyway, I get bored of waiting for it for about 2 days to verify and repair, slowing my work down to a crawl, would a hardware solution do this stuff faster and if so, what's the best for the money?
 
How much are you willing to spend?

The RocketRAID 2320 is pretty decent (I use one myself), not a full hardware solution but it has some onboard XOR acceleration. Comes in at about £150-200.

For a proper hardware card you're looking at over £300 for an 8 port Areca 1220 or one of the 3Ware cards.
 
I'm looking to spend as little as possible but don't want to compromise performance. As long as it at least matches and hopefully surpasses this onboard controller in terms of speed then it's all good!

How much faster are the £300+ cards and what other benefits do they have over the RocketRAID?
 
The expensive cards will have a far better write speed than either the onboard controller or the RocketRAID. Only other problem is that they tend to be PCI-e 8x cards so you need a free 16x slot for them.
 
Mint_Sauce said:
I'm looking to spend as little as possible but don't want to compromise performance. As long as it at least matches and hopefully surpasses this onboard controller in terms of speed then it's all good!

How much faster are the £300+ cards and what other benefits do they have over the RocketRAID?
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by the time you buy a good card plus backup battery which you need for best performance and more safety you're into it £400 ....more if you want to upgrade to more cache.

i think this kind of money is over the top for most home users but that's upto you.

the card rpstewart has recommended is probably a good balance between board raid versus pure hardware raid in terms of cost, it won't have as good write performance as a dedicated IOP based card but it also costs half as much and won't drop your array nearly as much as onboard will.
 
Get yourself a Dell Perc 5/i From ebay. 8 ports, full hardware acceleration, 256mb cache, PCI-Express connector, and support for SAS drives. They are rebranded LSI MegaRAID SAS 8408E cards, and would cost you hundreds normally, but they come as standard with many dell servers and arn't needed most of the time so theres usually lots on ebay.
You'll probably be able to get one for less than 75 quid, and then you'll need to buy a couple of sas to sata expander cables. Oh, you might need to scavenge a back plate from an old pci card as well.

You do need the second PCI-E slot though, but with the money you're saving you could get yourself a new motherboard with two slots and still come out on top.
 
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i was going to suggest the Perc 5/i myself but they require a bit more messing about to get working.

i actually have one coming to me which is stuck in customs somewhere :(
 
Cool, sounds good! Where could I get the sas to sata expander cables from? Any driver issues with Vista X64 I should know about or anything weird I will have to do to get it working?
 
Can't tell you where to buy them from (forum rules) but the cable you're likely to need is miniSAS (SFF-8087) to 4x SATA.

They cost around £10 each and the miniSAS to 4xSAS (SFF-8482) cost around £25-£30 but are very difficult to find.

The minSAS to 4xSAS cable should also support SATA II drives on the same connector.
 
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The other consideration is to spend the money on a couple of larger harddrives and run them in raid 10, no messing around with parity calculations, which slow the whole thing down whether software or hardware XOR. I have a 3ware 9500s 12 port card which was reasonably quick, but is still beaten by onboard Raid 10 particularly on writes. You do not say how many drives you have, but for example if you have 4 drives in Raid 5 it will give you 3 drives worth of space, the same can be achieved in Raid 10 by adding two more drives, giving far more redundancy and speed. Most P35 chipset boards have six SATA connectors, however worst comes to worst you can add a cheap sata card and mirror the two raid 0 arrays in Windows. Just a thought...
 
RAID 10 requires a minimum of 4 drives (which you have) but cannot work 5 drives. You'd either need to drop to 4 or get another to make 6.

Your current RAID 5 setup gives you approximately 2TB of unformatted disk space.

A RAID 10 setup with 4 disks will drop you down to approximately 1TB of unformatted disk space and 1.5TB with 6 disks.

The usable disk space calculation rule is the same as with RAID 1 (capacity of smallest drive x number of drives then divide by 2) except you need a minimum of 4 disks (instead of 2).
 
I think i might have Dell Perc 5 in my dell workstation....

that looks light fun. I might.... borrow that...

can anybody give us some more info how to get it to work and what i might need to make it work.
 
marscay said:
crazydat - all you need is a compatible motherboard and the drivers from dell, or you can flash it with LSI firmware and use their drivers/software as they are just rebadged LSI Megaraid cards.
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when you say compatible motherboard, do you mean one with a spare PCIe X8 slot??

I have an ASUS P5K-E wifi
 
The cards can be VERY picky when it comes to motherboard compatibility - they were not designed for the home enthusiast market - if you wonder over to 2cpu.com their storage section of the forum has a list of perc5/i compatible mobos.

(Damn you for finding those though - got me tempted again now, just when I thought the Scsi/SAS raid bug was behind me ;))
 
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