6/8 port Sata PCI-E Raid/Controller Card Recommendations

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lundrog

Member
Oct 9, 2008
68
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I am looking for a 6/8 port Sata PCI-E Raid/Controller Card to put into my main rig.

I have my bottom PCI-E slot open. I have a Thermaltake RC1600101A MAX-1562. I want to put in Six Sata 3/6GB SSD's. Today I will be 3x Micron M500DC and 2x M600 and a Samsung 1TB Evo for OS.

I do a fair amount of VMware workstation, running a things like two or three copies of VMware vSphere, and or or two of Server 2012 R2 at once for testing and blogging.

Raid would be a nice option, but not necessarily a requirement, as long as the throughput is good.

My Host OS on my workstation in my Sig is Server 2012 R2.

Recommendations?
 
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Arcanedeath

Platinum Member
Jan 29, 2000
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Something based on a Lsi sas 2008 chipset like the 9211-8i or the ibm m1015 would be a good choice.
 
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lundrog

Member
Oct 9, 2008
68
1
66
Arcanedeath said:
Something based on a Lsi sas 2008 chipset like the 9211-8i or the ibm m1015 would be a good choice.
Click to expand...

I should have said raid 5 would be nice.. I would need the advanced license on the IBM for that, and the LSI doesn't seem to support raid 5.

Would I need to have the IBM flashed to the LSI firmware also?
 
BonzaiDuck

BonzaiDuck

Lifer
Jun 30, 2004
16,325
1,887
126
lundrog said:
I should have said raid 5 would be nice.. I would need the advanced license on the IBM for that, and the LSI doesn't seem to support raid 5.

Would I need to have the IBM flashed to the LSI firmware also?
Click to expand...

Last time I followed that path, it was 4-drive RAID5 with a ~$400 3Ware 9650SE hardware controller that uses the SAS breakout cable.

This time around, I purchased a few of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-365-_-Product

I put two of them in available PCI_E slots of my server. The controller has port-multiplier capability allowing up to 7 drives -- three on the controller and four through "port-multiplier." I think one could get the port-multiplier device through Addonics, but a lot of folks cite having "drop-out" problems with port-multiplier configurations -- not specific to this controller. That's why I used two of these. They are AHCI compliant, offer RAID0, RAID1 and RAID 1+0 or "10."

If you DON'T WANT or NEED RAID, you simply skip changing the card's BIOS and allow Windows to install the MSAHCI native driver. Since I paid closer to $80 each for mine, today's price seems pretty good.

ALSO, PLEASE NOTE: I took a closer look at the cus-reviews again, and I'd looked at them closely last year before purchase. Somebody says you cannot have a boot/system drive attached. Baloney! Not true! There's absolutely no problem with that.

One more point about "features." The controller supports Marvell "Hyper-Duo" in both RAID and AHCI mode. That's Marvell's equivalent of Intel's ISRT SSD-caching/HDD-acceleration.
 
Last edited:
ronbo613

ronbo613

Golden Member
Jan 9, 2010
1,237
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One more point about "features." The controller supports Marvell "Hyper-Duo" in both RAID and AHCI mode. That's Marvell's equivalent of Intel's ISRT SSD-caching/HDD-acceleration.
Click to expand...
The thing with Marvell chip SATA controller cards is that if you have a Marvell controller on your motherboard(like some Gigabyte models) sometimes the storage drivers conflict and cause problems.
 
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