Good RAID5 hardware card?

[Qbah]

Hello,

Looking for a good PCI-e RAID card that supports RAID5. Not for me. The person does lots of rendering and is currently using the chipset software-based one (P45). Her data is very important, so I advised a hardware-based RAID solution (she's getting some start-up errors and is afraid to loose data). More than 4 ports not needed. Also, she can't really spend gobs of money on it either.

Thanks!

 

[Emulex]

old perc/6i or if you have an hp workstation P400/p410i - remember to get bbwc or flash back write cache 512 to 1GB or raid-5 will suck. Actually any raid will suck without a backed write cache due to the nature of striping.

IMO with cost of drives if you can do raid-10 you will be far happier. You can also get a much lower end pci-e raid controller (lsi/3ware) for simple raid.

Cheap and reliable do not go together my friend.

 

[Concillian]

Yes, RAID 1/0 should be a better solution overall. Or just RAID 1 if she doesn't have space requirements larger than a single drive.

RAID 5 is really quite costly to do "right". Much better for consumer level backup to just have multiple mirrors. Try to be able to accommodate single drives, then get three. RAID 1 for two of them, then do periodic backups to another external drive is what I do. Online storage is perhaps a better option than an external backup drive. A couple years of service charges will be cheaper than a good RAID 5 card.

 

[Qbah]

Thanks for the answers.

She doesn't want RAID 0 (has it now - not reliable) or 1 (not fast enough). RAID5 or RAID10 would work best for her (and that's what she wants ). I read about the 3ware/LSi cards, but apparently they kinda suck... Or maybe there are particular models that would be fine? She can't really drop $500 on the card but if there's one for ~$150-200 that would be fine. She'll be in the states in the near future so she could buy it there. Hence it needs to be good and reliable (no way to return it later).

Some links would be good too Thanks again!

 

[Nothinman]

If she's really worried about data loss she should be looking at a good, robust backup solution onto removable media, not RAID.

 

[Emulex]

you realize raid-1 reads from both drives so in read it is just as fast as raid-0 (good cards)

 

[Qbah]

If she's really worried about data loss she should be looking at a good, robust backup solution onto removable media, not RAID.

So keeping the RAID0 now and just backup stuff daily to an external drive? Why going for a RAID5 or RAID10 setup isn't better? Seems like it's an "automated" backup then - even if a drive in the array fails, she could recover easily (she would use 3 or 4 drives).

you realize raid-1 reads from both drives so in read it is just as fast as raid-0 (good cards)

Yeah Reads are also important for her though.

In the end she's looking for something that will be easy to use and pretty much hassle-free. I would think going with a RAID5/10 setup would give her that - no need to worry about data loss (to an extent ofc) and great speed.

But if it's bad, unreliable and requires lots of tinkering all the time, then I'll just tell her to do a RAID0 + backup. If so, any way to automate the backup process?

 

[Nothinman]

So keeping the RAID0 now and just backup stuff daily to an external drive? Why going for a RAID5 or RAID10 setup isn't better? Seems like it's an "automated" backup then - even if a drive in the array fails, she could recover easily (she would use 3 or 4 drives).



Yeah Reads are also important for her though.

In the end she's looking for something that will be easy to use and pretty much hassle-free. I would think going with a RAID5/10 setup would give her that - no need to worry about data loss (to an extent ofc) and great speed.

But if it's bad, unreliable and requires lots of tinkering all the time, then I'll just tell her to do a RAID0 + backup. If so, any way to automate the backup process?

It's not a backup because it only protects against a hardware failure. If the filesystem goes tits up or she accidentally deletes something there's no way to recover from that without a real backup system. A real backup system lets you get files back from X days, weeks, months, etc ago.

 

[Emulex]

BESR2010 is a great product for making lots of backups (near and far) and having them come back together in a time of need. honestly go raid-0 and get a good backup system in place. that is FAR FAR more reliable than raid and a crappy backup DR plan

 

[Qbah]

BESR2010 is a great product for making lots of backups (near and far) and having them come back together in a time of need. honestly go raid-0 and get a good backup system in place. that is FAR FAR more reliable than raid and a crappy backup DR plan

That thing costs $1k for a license... she just wants to increase reliability.

So in short, there's no ~$150-200 hardware RAID card that would give her RAID5/10 capabilities for increased read and write speed plus a lot better reliability than RAID0?

 

[Mark R]

Look on ebay for an LSI 1068E or SAS2008 based card. These come up occasionally for very low cost (they are standard in low-end servers, but the RAID 5 performance isn't particulary great because there is no BBWC). Many datacenters have preferred RAID cards, so it's common for people to buy a server with the lowest-end RAID card and then replace it with their preferred card, while getting rid of the old card on ebay.

Things like the IBM Serveraid BR10i (8 port 3Gbps), MR10i (8 port 3 Gbps - upgradeable to BBWC), M1015 (8 port 6 Gbps) all come up pretty regularly and can be bought for €50-100.

None of these cards will do RAID 5/50 out of the box (you need to buy the very expensive license key to activate it) - however, in the absence of a BBWC, RAID5/50 isn't particularly great, so you aren't missing much. Using these cards for RAID 10 should be fine.

 

[Emulex]

okay symantec ghost 15 is the same program as besr 10 try again.. besr 2010 is $79 for a workstation.

 

[ChrisBenn]

Look on ebay for an LSI 1068E or SAS2008 based card. These come up occasionally for very low cost (they are standard in low-end servers, but the RAID 5 performance isn't particulary great because there is no BBWC). Many datacenters have preferred RAID cards, so it's common for people to buy a server with the lowest-end RAID card and then replace it with their preferred card, while getting rid of the old card on ebay.

Things like the IBM Serveraid BR10i (8 port 3Gbps), MR10i (8 port 3 Gbps - upgradeable to BBWC), M1015 (8 port 6 Gbps) all come up pretty regularly and can be bought for €50-100.

None of these cards will do RAID 5/50 out of the box (you need to buy the very expensive license key to activate it) - however, in the absence of a BBWC, RAID5/50 isn't particularly great, so you aren't missing much. Using these cards for RAID 10 should be fine.

Raid 10 with one of those cards will probably be your most performant for the buck solution.

Actually SSD's are the best bet if you can get enough disk space, but barring that a raid 10 disk setup.

For backups, IMO, image to a NAS & store what you can in an online service (crashplan, etc). If its business critical place another NAS offsite and use external drives to rotate data to it.