Question HBA for raid 5 - windows 10

[kappen]

Hi,

I need help finding a suitable raid controller that supports raid5 and works in Windows 10. Found an old 9260-8i lying around, does not seem to work that well in windows 10, seems like support ended in windows 7.

I've looked at LSI 9300-8i, it says it's supported, but I cannot find any information that it actually is, downloading the actual driver itself and checking readme and pdfs reveals nothing (https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9300-8i)

Are there any other cards that might work for this? Does not have to be a LSI card.

Thanks

 

[Viper GTS]

The card you linked is not a RAID card.

RAID Controller Cards

Our RAID controllers address virtually all direct-attached storage (DAS) environments – SATA or SAS, hard drives or solid state drives (SSDs)

www.broadcom.com

That one should do what you want.

The bigger question I would ask - Why do you want to run RAID 5 in 2020?

Why RAID 6 stops working in 2019

Three years ago I warned that RAID 5 would stop working in 2009. Sure enough, no enterprise storage vendor now recommends RAID 5. Now it's RAID 6, which protects against 2 drive failures. But in 2019 even RAID 6 won't protect your data. Here's why.

www.zdnet.com

Viper GTS

 

[bluechris]

Better grab a hpe 420 2gb fwbc card with 2 cables that will give you 8 x sata ports.
The card is Rock solid and the raid is flying.
Its dead cheap.

HP 631670-B21 G8 Smart Array P420/2GB FBWC 6Gb 2P SAS Controller Card Battery 2G | eBay

ETA 3 to 6 Weeks.

rover.ebay.com

I personally have the bigger p440 with 4gb cache but this one is more expensive and you need a lot of cables and adapters to v end up with 8 sata ports.

With the p420 you need extra only 2 x sas to 4xsata cables

 

[Micrornd]

Found an old 9260-8i lying around, does not seem to work that well in windows 10, seems like support ended in windows 7.

The last Windows 10 driver for that card can be found here -

Broadcom Inc. | Connecting Everything

docs.broadcom.com

It's release date was 12/17/2018

 

[kappen]

The card you linked is not a RAID card.

RAID Controller Cards

Our RAID controllers address virtually all direct-attached storage (DAS) environments – SATA or SAS, hard drives or solid state drives (SSDs)

www.broadcom.com

That one should do what you want.

The bigger question I would ask - Why do you want to run RAID 5 in 2020?

Why RAID 6 stops working in 2019

Three years ago I warned that RAID 5 would stop working in 2009. Sure enough, no enterprise storage vendor now recommends RAID 5. Now it's RAID 6, which protects against 2 drive failures. But in 2019 even RAID 6 won't protect your data. Here's why.

www.zdnet.com

Viper GTS

Yeah, both 5 and 6 might not be good enough, but what other solutions are there. I guess running freenas with zfs on direct access is another solution, no idea if its better than raid5+6? However that requires an additional box.

 

[Viper GTS]

In short, yes it is much better. RAIDZ3 has a ridiculous MTTDL:

Simple MTTDL RAID-Z3 - ServeTheHome

Simple MTTDL RAID-Z3

www.servethehome.com

All of this of course is no substitute for backups, but IMO a decent sized RAID5 set today is just asking for an unplanned test of your backup strategy.

I have run ZFS since 2011 but I am actually considering switching to Synology. Just letting it do its thing with nightly pushes to a cloud provider that will ship me data on a drive if I need it has a lot of appeal.

Viper GTS

 

[aigomorla]

the 9280 doesnt even require a driver for windows 10.
It should automatically pick up.

Also most HBA do not have a raid controller on it.
HBA's would be dependant on your onboard raid controller to support raid 5 then onboard.

the 9280 is also not a HBA...


I run both a FreeNAS RAIDZ2 and Raid5 on an LSI using that exact controller.
Raid5 is OK.... i mean its not the best, but its still somewhat fault protected by 1 hot spare.
It does need disk optimizing from time to time, or you will have slower speeds on transfers.

I am actually considering switching to Synology

i was actually considering this route until i realized how unreliabile the PSU's are in those units.
look up all the problems associated with DS units, and i realized why i went freenas.

its because EVERY LAST PART NOOK CRANIE DOWN TO THE SCREWS i can service myself and not be at the mercy of the OEM, unless its a failed RMA part, which i can then just replace it with another vendor if they tick me off.

 

[Fallen Kell]

Yeah, both 5 and 6 might not be good enough, but what other solutions are there. I guess running freenas with zfs on direct access is another solution, no idea if its better than raid5+6? However that requires an additional box.

ZFS is vastly better than raid5 and raid6 if you set it up properly. Even straight out just using raidz1 (equivalent to RAID 5), you have the added bonus file integrity checksums (i.e. when a file is written to disk a checksum is made so that ZFS can tell you if the file became corrupted). This alone is a huge reason to want to use ZFS. And as stated above, on modern disks that are 8TB and larger, I would be looking to use raidz2 or 3 and/or some combination of multiple smaller raidz groups that are stripped (or mirrored) together depending on how important your data is to you and how often you backup.

I've been running ZFS at work since 2006 and I can say that it can be more robust than anything else that I have seen. Case and point, we once had a group of new datacenter technicians powering up from a planned power outage and they forgot to turn on 1 of the 4 storage arrays in this particular lab. There were no calls or hotlines, or complaints and it wasn't discovered until the following week during the weekly hardware checks. The filesystem(s) were all working because when we setup the initial ZFS disk pool we planned ahead trying to determine what was the largest single point of failure that could occur (in this case, losing an entire array), and so our disk pool was crafted such that we could lose an array and the filesystems still be available to the end users and operational. We simply powered the array up and let it sync.