Looking at SATA III RAID Controllers

[ShadowValentine]

I'm considering buying a RAID controller for my system, for use with either 3 Western Digital 2TB Greens or 5 WD 1TB Blacks in Raid 5. Any suggestions?

I'm looking at the Intel RS2WC080, simply because it's available for order at a nearby store listed below.

I am in Australia, if that makes a difference.

http://ark.intel.com/products/43164/...oller-RS2WC080
http://www.austin.net.au/intel-raid-...ow-profil.html

 

[Soulkeeper]

Those look nice.
Another option is the recently released adaptec 7000 series (if available for you).

I've got no experience with highend raid cards.
Personally I went budget and got one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816115114
They actually have an arm cpu integrated. So it's hardware raid without the big dram cache and without sas or battery backup features.
Just to clarify "Marvell 88SE9230" appears to be listed as hardware raid, 9235 says "No" in the marvell product brief.

What exactly are you going to be using this card/drives for ?
consumer drives with a highend card ?
have you considered software raid (linux provides great performance/options) ?

 

[ShadowValentine]

I am using software raid currently, however I've maxed out the amount of sata 3 ports on my motherboard. I will be using it for my home rig, private consumer use.

This is the closest one to the one you mentioned I managed to find at a glance:
http://www.ple.com.au/ViewItem.aspx?InventoryItemID=608539

Austin has some terrible sorting for its searches, so I'll look in further depth later.

 

[ShadowValentine]

Any further recommendations before I go ahead to buy the RS2W?

 

[Soulkeeper]

Personally, I'd just stick with software raid.
Unless you have tlc/erc enterprise drives, extra money, a really slow cpu, sas, need the battery backup features(cost extra). Also the cost of the sas breakout cables can be spendy too.
consumer drives + software raid work fine.

I say this, but ultimately it's a personal choice.

 

[mikeymikec]

Is anyone else confused by "supports up to x devices" when it doesn't have that many SATA ports?

+1 on the battery backup (or at least some sort of configuration backup system). I wouldn't consider buying a RAID card without one. Not that I've bought many RAID cards

 

[ShadowValentine]

Like I said, I'm out of sata ports on my motherboard so I need a hardware raid card for my hdds. I take it this will be slower than my motherboard though, read/write wise?

 

[mikeymikec]

I take it this will be slower than my motherboard though, read/write wise?

I think that would depend on the PCIE lane/channel layout of your board's chipset / board implementation.

 

[Soulkeeper]

Is anyone else confused by "supports up to x devices" when it doesn't have that many SATA ports?

+1 on the battery backup (or at least some sort of configuration backup system). I wouldn't consider buying a RAID card without one. Not that I've bought many RAID cards

they use breakout cables like these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816132040

 

[Soulkeeper]

Like I said, I'm out of sata ports on my motherboard so I need a hardware raid card for my hdds. I take it this will be slower than my motherboard though, read/write wise?

cheap HBAs can solve that
software raid can span multiple controllers

 

[MrPickins]

Oops, wrong thread. (Too many tabs open)

 

[ShadowValentine]

HBA?

 

[Soulkeeper]

HBA?

Host bus adapters (HBAs)
basically sata/sas ports without the hardware raid.
IE: $30 cards that add 4 ports

 

[ShadowValentine]

Won't that slow down the read/write speed and/or lose access to drives?

 

[Cerb]

Won't that slow down the read/write speed and/or lose access to drives?

Yes and no.

Compared to software RAID 5 you're using now, and/or chipset RAID 5: no.
Compared to HW RAID 5 using a controller with no/minimal read cache (typical cheaper LSI or 3Ware): a little bit.
Compared to HW RAID 5 using a controller with read cache: somewhat.
Compared to HW RAID 5 using a controller with read and write cache and a BBU: by a lot.

Ultimately, RAID 5 is slow. Fancy controllers can mask that by caching, but there's good reason RAID 1 and haven't died off.

Is anyone else confused by "supports up to x devices" when it doesn't have that many SATA ports?

Some chips support port expanders. I know common SIL and Marvell chips do. "RAID" enclosures with e-SATA ports typically expose the drives directly, that way.

 

[Soulkeeper]

http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1306266-SO-1306266SO28

Here are some benchmarks I did with two FAEX drives recently.
The hardware raid actually loses compared to software raid in most things.
Granted this is essentially the cheapest hardware raid card (no onboard ram), and i'm only doing a 2 drive raid0.
A reasonably fast cpu + software raid is relatively competitive performance wise.

 

[aigomorla]

are u gonna use a FreeBSD NAS software?

If you are.. id say stay with the LSI Fusion class chipset for compatibility...
U can also get a IBM M1015 and flash it.
http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/

The IBM M1015 is very cheap compared to all the other Raid cards on Ebay.
I picked one up for like 95 dollars... havent flashed mine yet... but im gonna toss it in a FreeNAS box i have setup to house 6x3TB
(i need a new Norco RPC-4220 server box... and the HDD's.... but broke for next couple of months on other projects.)

 

[ShadowValentine]

I'm using it on my regular system, Windows 7 64-bit. If you like, I can post my specs?

 

[Jamoe836]

Have you considered using an external enclosure, moving all your digital output to it, and possibly installing an SSD drive to boost performance if that is a concern (SSD screams for the OS and essentials)? The enclosure, anyway, would help when it is time to replace your PC... you wouldn't have a bunch of money sunk into an old pc that is being replaced and all your data would basically easily port over, cutting down the hassle factor tremendously... just an idea, but I don't know the set of problems you are actually trying to solve here, so just food for though... good luck

 

[Cerb]

Alternatively, build a NAS, w/ FreeNAS or NAS4Free. RAID-Z is one way of solving much of the speed problems of RAID 5/6, while still having pretty good storage efficiency.

 

[Agent11]

You can still find pcie 6gb/s sas/sata raid controllers on ebay, usually pulled from brand new servers.

Try searching for DELL PERC H310 (although note this controller is slower than advertised in JBOD mode, so I would only get this for running RAID)

or

IBM ServeRAID M1015

Should be able to find these for under 100 on ebay, although some people are starting to buy them up and extort higher prices.

 

[aigomorla]

i would try to move the storage aspect off my main system and into a NAS.

Also another alternative as someone else listed is going external Raid5 box... and using a ESATA card or ESATA port on your board.

The ESATA enclosure should have RAID via jumper.
Then just plug in the ESATA port to your PC.

Example being like one of these guys.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816111177

however u'll probably lose SATA3... SATA 2 isnt really an issue until u get to IO speeds greater then R0 3 x SSD's.

 

[ShadowValentine]

Sorry, I'm rather new to all of this, so pardon me as I try to process this xD

I'm just trying to make use of all of my hard drives, since I have more drives than I do SATA ports. I was recommended to use RAID by a source (whose reliability I am starting to question) in order to access all of the drives in an uncluttered form while boosting read/write speeds. I don't really know anything about external enclosures?

@Cerb I have no idea what you just said

@aigo What kind of differences will I be noticing?

 

[Cerb]

@Cerb I have no idea what you just said

Network Attached Storage. A server, on your network, storing files. Storing them and serving them being its reason for existing. FreeNAS is a FreeBSD-based file server distro. NAS4Free is the current version of the original FreeNAS. ZFS is a file-system that was basically designed to fix some of the problems of standard RAID implementations. RAID-Z1/Z2/Z3 are its parity-based RAIDs, like RAID 5 or 6. It was made by Sun, FreeBSD implemented it years ago, and Linux just got it.

RAID 0 (no redundancy) will boost read and write speeds.

RAID 10 will also boost read and write speeds, but offer 1 drive's worth of redundancy. You only get half the space, though (it's a RAID 0 or RAID 1 arrays)

RAID 5 or 6 will offer you a drive or two of redundancy, and improve read speeds, but not write speeds. For every write, it must read all the stripes in a set, calculate new parity, and write the new data and parity.

 

[youshotwhointhe]

ZFS is a file-system that was basically designed to fix some of the problems of standard RAID implementations. RAID-Z1/Z2/Z3 are its parity-based RAIDs, like RAID 5 or 6. It was made by Sun, FreeBSD implemented it years ago, and Linux just got it.

ZFS addresses a lot of issues that have nothing to do with RAID, overall RAIDZ is a relatively small part of ZFS. That said, the performance of RAIDZ isn't really better than a similar configuration of software RAID (similar amount of RAM writeback cache, perhaps SSD writeback cache).

Also it is worth mentioning that BSD hardware support tends to lag behind Linux (sometimes significantly). On the other hand ZFS on Linux still seems to be somewhat unpolished.

RAID 10 will also boost read and write speeds, but offer 1 drive's worth of redundancy. You only get half the space, though (it's a RAID 0 or RAID 1 arrays)

RAID10 offers as much as N/2 drives worth of redundancy (only in the worst case can it not survive a two drive failure).

RAID 5 or 6 will offer you a drive or two of redundancy, and improve read speeds, but not write speeds. For every write, it must read all the stripes in a set, calculate new parity, and write the new data and parity.

The write speed problems can be alleviated with a cache that allows you to write out large sequential chunks to the drive set and minimize associated reads. Quality hardware RAID controllers have battery backed RAM (or even better flash backed RAM). You can also use SSDs as a write cache (i.e. in Linux using bcache or dm-cache). If you use your own RAM as a cache for software RAID you should have (and trust) a UPS.

You should definitely avoid RAID5 with consumer drives. When a drive fails and the array tries to rebuild you have a high chance of getting at least one read error from one of your drives. At a minimum you will lose data, at worst you will lose the entire array.