Assistance with selecting RAID card/setup

[DKNYSprt95]

Hello! I'm looking for assistance in choosing an optimal raid card & setup for my small office environment. With my knowledge being little to none (built only 1 RAID setup in the last 5 yrs) its fairly difficult for me to select something appropriate.

As a background - I put together and maintain 10 workstations + server with XP/Vista/7 depends on acquisition date; with the earlier ones being built from parts and the later ones being Dell Vostro systems.

The server currently is 3-4 yrs old w/ Core 2 E6600, 4GB RAM, 4x 500gb HDD's on a Promise card with Raid 10, on W2K3. I use it for QB Enterprise (5 Users via Remote Desktop) and as file server. I'm starting to see strain during peak hours as well as software/OS compatibility issues.

I'm looking to do a Raid 10 with 6 drives and at least 3TB of usable space and was wondering if someone can recommend or point me in the right direction to choose a decent card + HDD combos. Its a little hard because choices vary between on-board raid and basically $50-1000 RAID controllers. Thanks much!

 

[RaiderJ]

A RAID 1/0 between 6 drives can be done on a motherboard chipset - no need to go buy a special controller.

Here's a list of Intel motherboards at Newegg that have 6 SATA ports, RAID 10, sorted by rating.

 

[yinan]

For any business situation you want hardware RAID, not Intel Fake raid.

Areca makes really good controllers.

 

[RaiderJ]

For any business situation you want hardware RAID, not Intel Fake raid.

Areca makes really good controllers.

Serious question: how is the onboard controller for a 6 drive RAID 10 array not sufficient for a business? It's my understanding that such a setup is not demanding on the host system, and adding in another piece of hardware just gives another point of failure.

If it were RAID 5, I'd agree a hardware controller would make sense. You can't just say hardware RAID=Good, software RAID=Bad (because that's entirely false).

 

[Ayah]

In general, you don't need hardware for RAID10 unless you intend to use SAS or more than 6 drives.

Also... budget = ?

Budget will define whether you use 7200rpm consumer drives, 10/15k RPM SAS or SSDs.

 

[DKNYSprt95]

Budget is enough to get 6 or 8 SATA II or SATA III 7200 RPM hard drives. Pricing seems fairly close to one another on the HDD side; havent researched MB's yet. I dont need more than 2 TB at the moment.

So... hypothetical situation... if I got a motherboard with onboard RAID and the motherboard dies, how do I put the RAID array back together to recover the data?

 

[Old Hippie]

if I got a motherboard with onboard RAID and the motherboard dies, how do I put the RAID array back together to recover the data?

The chipset that created the array is the key to the RAID operation.

Buy the same or compatable chipset and you're good to go.

 

[Emulex]

yeah real raid you can move generationally (sas to sas/sata to sata/scsi to scsi) across chassis or servers or chipsets - hp for instance - no problem going from internal raid to a chassis raid.