Help me find a RAID PCI card.

[genEus]

I have now spent over half an hour trying to find a RAID card for a RAID 1 setup. I don't want an ATA card which uses software for RAID, I want a true hardware RAID. Also, sometimes I see cards listed under the RAID category but which do not list RAID as one of their capabilities. Prices range from $15 to $100 in general, and I'm so confused!!

Please help!

 

[Viper96720]

ide or sata? Promise makes some

 

[genEus]

IDE. I was thinking of this: http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?p=IDE-SFTX2E&c=pw
but it's expensive... and it's the lowest price... but if that's what it costs, so be it

 

[Viper96720]

That's a serial ata one.
Might be better just get a motherboard with onboard raid controller. Price won't be that much different.
http://www.newegg.com/app/View...=16-102-008&depa=1
{romise TX2000

 

[genEus]

It has ATA too, not only SATA.

Don't wanna bother with a mobo, it's a Compaq PC, AMD XP 3000+

 

[heartsurgeon]

.

 

[Viper96720]

That card has 1 ide connector and 2 sata. If your using 2 ata drives I don't think you'll want them on the same cable.

 

[Viper96720]

http://www.promise.com/product...ist_eng.asp?familyId=2
List of ata and sata raid cards from promise

 

[WalkingDead]

I don't think those Promise and Highpoint cards are real hardware Raid cards. No even the 2 channel Adaptec nor the LSI Logic one. None of the buildin raid function on motherboard is a true hardware either.

The only real hardware 2-channel cards are made by 3ware and they starts at $150+.

 

[genEus]

Originally posted by: Viper96720
That card has 1 ide connector and 2 sata. If your using 2 ata drives I don't think you'll want them on the same cable.

Why not? Will the RAID not function, or just because of having a shared cable? I don't really care for performance as this is an office PC, and have in the past had two hard drives sharing one cable... Is it really that bad?

 

[Jeff7]

Just curious, but why must it be a pure hardware-based RAID card for a basic function like RAID 1?

 

[Zucarita9000]

I believe this would be a true hardware solution. I mean, compare this to this.. The downside: it costs $390.

 

[genEus]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Just curious, but why must it be a pure hardware-based RAID card for a basic function like RAID 1?

I dunno... Just heard that they're better/faster/less error prone... Am I wrong here? I REALLY don't want to lose my data ever again... also don't wanna spend $390 though

 

[Steve]

3ware if you want hardware RAID on any kind of ATA channel.

 

[racolvin]

Personally I bought the LSI Logic SATA 150-4 but I'm doing RAID 5. It was a little over $200 for a hardware RAID solution (SATA of course) but it does what its supposed to do without getting Windows involved in the RAID process.

R

 

[AMD Die Hard]

I have a Adaptec ATA RAID 1200A just sitting around. I'll let it go for $40 including shipping just to save myself the effort of ebaying it. I don't know if its what you are looking for, but its cheap and I guarentee it not to be DOA

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: genEus

Originally posted by: Jeff7
Just curious, but why must it be a pure hardware-based RAID card for a basic function like RAID 1?

I dunno... Just heard that they're better/faster/less error prone... Am I wrong here? I REALLY don't want to lose my data ever again... also don't wanna spend $390 though

I don't know about speed; I did have two drives in RAID 0 awhile ago using a cheap PCI thing from Newegg. I did corrupt it once, but that was because I was testing out my CPU's upper GHz limits that day. Apparently I went too high - first ntfs.sys was lost, then the entire partition. Oops. Other than that, it all worked fine. Speed? CPU utilization was very low - no higher than in any of my other systems using onboard non-RAID IDE controllers.

I could plug the Promise sx4000 right now, and suggest RAID 5, but I do that enough. That, and that's an expensive, but elegant, solution. The card alone is around $150, plus a stick of RAM for it, plus the drives. Link.

I did just find too, it's not available at Newegg. I only see the SX4060 now. Looks like a step up though; the SX4060 already has 64MB of ECC RAM right there on the card. Doesn't say what the max it'll support is though; the SX4000 had a max of 256MB.

These SX40X0 cards are long cards, just so you know. Not all cases can take one.

If you do go RAID 5, you can get some pretty impressive speeds, along with redundancy. I've got 4 drives in RAID 5, and when I run benchmarks, I get sustained read speeds over 100MB/sec.