which SATA RAID controller card ?

Mr Spoon · 23 Jan 2007 at 16:08

I have 2x74Gb SATA Raptors and I want to RAID 0 them with a controller card (onboard doesn't work). I dont want to go PCI because of the bottleneck, so which card or interface should I go for ?

will PCI-e x1 be ok, or should I go for PCI-e x4 ?

thanks

rpstewart · 23 Jan 2007 at 16:37

PCIe 1x should be fine for 2 drives, you've got 250Mb/s to play with which is dedicated to the slot so plenty available. 4x will give you 1000Mb/s.

If you're only looking for RAID0 then the choice is pretty wide and all I'd be worried about would be driver availability etc so I'd be looking at manufacturers like Adaptec or Highpoint.

Mr Spoon · 23 Jan 2007 at 16:39

thanks, will a controller card such as the ones from Highpoint be better than onboard anyway ?

rpstewart · 23 Jan 2007 at 17:02

For RAID0 there's not much difference between the various card manufacturers and the onboard solutions. There's very little for the controller to do and hence there's not much scope for optimisation within the controller.

Mr Spoon · 23 Jan 2007 at 17:25

I'm more worried about hitting a bottleneck on the PCI-e or else if a PCI-e raid controller causes a performance loss on any other device.

rpstewart · 23 Jan 2007 at 17:37

The nice thing about PCIe is that each slot has it's own allocation of PCIe lanes. Each lane carries 250Mb/s per second so a 1x (1 lane) slot has a dedicated 250Mb/s, 4x has 4 lanes and 16x should have 16 lanes although some SLi boards split 16 lanes between the 2 slots.

Regardless even PCIe 1x has something like 25% more bandwidth than a pair of 150Gb Raptors needs in RAID0. The bandwidth for the slot is not shared with anything so there are none of the problems that are associated with plain 33Mhz 32bit PCI.

Mr Spoon · 23 Jan 2007 at 17:50

ok thanks!