Best 8-Port PciEx Raid Card For Home Use

[Rat9]

I have relatively large space requirements (5-10 TB) and i have been through a lot of NAS units, servers and raid cards. I am tired of mixing multiple 2 and 4 port raid cards and i am looking for a 8 port card. It seems like no company makes a GOOD 8 port PCIe card with raid 5 for say near 250. It does need to be super-fast, or have any crazy features.

Am i asking the impossible? :hmm:

I have investigated nearly every card newegg sells and they all have such bad ratings !!! Anyone have an 8 port card they LIKE?

 

[garritynet]

Gunblade has an oem pulled LSI 3ware 9650SE-8LPML PCI Express for sale for $300.

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=143700&highlight=3ware

This is the one he is selling. He accidentally used the same link for the previous listing.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-043-_-Product

I purchased one of his LSI 3ware 9650SE-4LPML PCI Express cards last week. It was an outstanding deal at $160. He shipped the next day, it arrived quickly and in new condition. The cable had never been opened and the card looked exactly like an OEM pull that had also never been used. I highly recommend this card for your budget. Also, from my research, the some of the WD non-raid drives do poorly in RAID5 with 3ware cards.

http://www.3ware.com/KB/attachments...v1.0-GUID8a217be53beb46dda552efb8476f86d2.pdf

I am using it for RAID 0 with WD drives. I have never before run a RAID setup and I had this one running in under half an hour.

 

[Emulex]

ebay - p400 with two 4 port expander cables
dell makes something similar.

you can go for the go-bots of raid cards - or industry standard. just make sure your mobo can handle them.

 

[pjkenned]

What chipset are you using? How many GigE ports are you feeding? What raid levels?

$260 you are in the Adaptec 3085 or Perc 5/i off ebay territory w/ BBU.

Think that you'll want a BBU it is $120-$130, so it doesn't leave much for a good card.

 

[wiretap]

Highpoint RocketRAID 2320 is decent for the money. I have several friends using it and they've had no problems running RAID5 arrays. (I just came from using Highpoint for several years -- they make good value level cards) Of course it isn't true hardware RAID, but it has a processor on it which offsets quite a bit of load from your CPU. The OCE expansion works well too. For being cheap cards, I've actually found them to be very reliable.

 

[garritynet]

I may be wrong but it is my understanding that for a desktop user UPS is a better investment than a BBU.

 

[pjkenned]

I may be wrong but it is my understanding that for a desktop user UPS is a better investment than a BBU.

I use both, but they do different things. The UPS does more, but in reality the BBU is much longer in duration, and is tied to the card. If you have any chance of interrupting the power from your UPS to PC (e.g. chord gets kicked accidently) the UPS does nothing. Also, if the PC doesn't shut down fast enough, and you get an odd power cycle you risk corrupt data due to the cache.

Both accomplish different things, however for home users, most people do pick the UPS because it keeps the system up.

 

[Emulex]

the new p410 has flash based backup - no battery.

the battery is good for 0 to 72 hours depending on age and charge state. there are many features that can not be done (sanely) without a (flash/battery) backed write cache. like restriping (block size), raid migration, raid expansion. you can convert raid-10 to raid-5 while running safely, including running out of power with the BBWC/FBWC. the flash based is brand new technology. up to 1gb. wonder if its a bunch of slc chips with a capacitor.

A nice 750 to 1000 watt apc with apcupsd can shutdown your file server/htpc gracefully for sure. it can command many pc's to shutdown via network as well (apcupsd is open source and runs on *nix/osx/windows*).

I can't imagine why you'd skimp on a $50-100 battery back up when building a nice raid system that is insane.

Benefit of the hp smartarray controllers if they work with your mobo is they use the same CCISSM driver for like that last ??? 10 years ??? and will continue to do so. e200,p400,p410,etc. stable - linux (think vmware esx) especially.

nothing sucks more than to upgrade to a new generation pc/raid controller and not have the option of just swapping the drives over.

i've had dell do this trick on me because of a failed 1U rack server. they brought out a whole new server - fancy - new raid controller- not compatible with old raid controller format - had to rebuild the freebsd box. most people that have used freebsd know you could stuff the image/disks in any hardware and it would just boot and work.

BBWC - for sure
APC backup with usb cable - for sure
small costs to do it right

 

[Rat9]

Thanks for all the suggestions! Has anyone used a "Promise SuperTrak EX8350"? Ebay has them for $199 .... is saving $100 instead of getting the LSI 3ware 9650SE-8LPML worth it?


I had a promise raid 5 card back in the day and it sucked bad..... are they any better now?