Looking for a cheap sata hardware raid 1 controller (PCI-E)

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hammer256

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Mar 26, 2011
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Hello, I've posted about this in Tom's hardware also, but I want to see if you guys have any advice on a basic raid 1 sata controller. I just need raid 1 and nothing fancier, but I want a hardware raid controller.

Currently I'm looking at the Intel SASWT4I using LSI SAS1064E chipset with fusion-mpt architecture. Seems interesting, but Does anyone have experience with this card? What's your thought on it? Do you know if fusion-mpt is supported in Windows 7 (64bit)?

Do you guys have any other suggestions? My budget is around $150.

Thanks.

hammer
 
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adamantinepiggy

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May 29, 2010
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Well that's a helluva price for that card.. New they are a LOT more expensive (like $275ish). I ordered one, because at $31 shipped for a SAS/SATA LSI-chip equipped PCIe card, it's a downright hot deal. Yeah, it's only 3G/s, but not that big a deal, as smart SAS cards offload much of the the load. Note that it's a refurb, but so what at that price and it does include a 3 year warrantee from them..

As a SAS/SATA smart controller, it'll perform better than "any" addon PCIe SATA card in that $30 price range (or probably as well as any under $200). Like the ASUS crappy 6G/s or highpoint crap. Not having played with this particular model (though I've played with other similar IBM models) it might be a slow booter, but none of the SAS cards tend to be speedy in this regard. I would guess it isn't going to come with the cabling (not a big deal since I have extras, but keep in mind that the SAS SFF-8087 internal mini-SAS 36 to SATA cabling (4 SATA ports) is gonna cost around $10 to $20 after shipping online.
 
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hammer256

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Mar 26, 2011
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I totally agree. I've not seen a new hardware raid card for less than 130, this is totally a steal. I think I'll get two, can always find uses for them later :)

Time to find out if they'll work with P55 chipset using the other x16 slot... hopefully that dual x8 mode isn't GPU only...

Thanks a lot ChrisBenn for posting the link :)
 
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ChrisBenn

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2001
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NP - Found the link from someone else on [H] Forums. Most people pick those up for ZFS servers as they are pretty much rock solid and well supported.

As was mentioned, caveats are max HD size of 2TB and 3Gbps interface, and it doesn't come with a bracket to mount to the back of the case (min just sits snugly in the PCI-e socket). It's also PCIe-1.0 (not 2.0) - but it's not a bandwidth limit.

I was suspicious as well, but for 30 bucks shipped figured whatever - the card came in, was very well packed, and it's up and working (in a ZFS box).

Here's a quick post I did on another forum about flashing the firmware on the card (I flashed the IT firmware, which is no raid - if you did the same thing you would just want the IR firmware) - http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=21468917#p21468917
 
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hammer256

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Mar 26, 2011
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Well, I can't imagine sata 6G come into play for mechanical drives anyway. I'm mainly going to use this for desktop/workstation applications where having raid 1 can ensure minimal system downtime when a drive dies.

Again, thanks a lot for the info. This is absolutely fantastic. Looking forward to test this card out with the firmware flash. Have my fingers crossed that it'll work in dual x8 mode (along with the GPU) with the P55 chipset, but otherwise the x4 slot looks possible. I really doubt PCI-E bandwidth is going to be an issue for just running a few drives in raid 1.

Wen
 
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Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
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thanks ordered 10 :) will build a monstrous ZFS array since it claims to be so cool. RAID 1E is somewhat like RAID10 and RAID5 - i'm really curious about the support of that. mass a grid of storage now that RE4's are cheap. Would really like to see what ZFS + SSD's + gobs of ram can do for shiz n giggle. 40 2TB RE4 drives lol. boss is going to love this request.

Where is a good place for the SF8087-->4 SATA or SAS for $10?
 
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ChrisBenn

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2001
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Honestly I used eBay for lots of cabling stuff
http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_trkpar...&_sticky=1&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14&_sop=15&_sc=1

just make sure you get a "Forward" direction (means the SFF-8087 is the host side and the sata connector is the drive side) - they also make reverse - i.e. if you wanted to take 4 motherboard sata headers to connect to a SFF-8087 backplane - and they aren't interchangeable.


i'm really curious about the support of that. mass a grid of storage now that RE4's are cheap
Click to expand...

You really don't need to use the RE4's with ZFS - I think right now the Hitachi 5k3000 is one of the more straightforward go to drives. The only thing to be aware of is that there are some considerations/issues with 4k vs. 512 byte section drives. Right now if you get all Hitachi's you have 512 so there is nothing you need to worry about. There's a setting (called ashift) that the OS uses to determine how to handle the sectors - if you make your storage pool (what you add all your groups of drives together in) with 512, you get an ashift of 9 on the storage pool, and you *can't* add 4k VDEVS (groups of hard drives in ZFS - that's how you get the raid functionality) without serious performance implications. If you make your pool with a 4k (ashift of 12) VDEV(s) initially than your pool gets an ashift of 12, and that's "backwards" compatible with 512 sector drives (since 4k / 512 is a whole number - the other way is 512/4k, which obviously isn't a whole number). So it's probably more future proof to use 4k sector drives (basically anything but the WD Green drives are okay). The issue there becomes that all these drives still report a 512e sector side (512 emulated) - if they reported a 4k sector size there would be no problem. For the solaris side there are modified zpool binaries which you can use once to create your zpool with an ashift of 12 then be done (can get rid of it). On the FreeBSD ZFS side there's a program called gnop that can be used to set this on pool creation. The key thing is you set this parameter when you first create the pool and you can't change it after that.

Whew.
 
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hammer256

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Mar 26, 2011
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ChrisBenn said:
You really don't need to use the RE4's with ZFS - I think right now the Hitachi 5k3000 is one of the more straightforward go to drives...
Click to expand...

On a related note, what is the situation with the CCTL/TLER/ERC business with Hitachi desktop drives? I know western digital is a pain about TLER (you have to get RE4 drives for TLER to be enabled). Samsung and Hitachi are supposedly using CCTL, and Samsung's support for it on Desktop drives isn't that great. But I've not heard any concrete information about CCTL for Hitachi desktop drives.
Also, I just wonder how big of a deal it really is with CCTL/TLER for an entry level hardware raid 1... if a drive is taking forever to recover from an error then it probably need to be replaced anyways?
 
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ChrisBenn

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2001
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For Raid 1 I don't think the TLER/Whatever (or head parking on the greens, etc.) is much of an issue - it's just when you get the stripes across multiple drives since controllers tend to be quick to drop disks out of the array.
 
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docp

Senior member
Jul 4, 2007
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hey guys,
i want to add a 6 gbps controller to my asus mobo ,
i do plan to add ssd later on so 6gbps should be their.
which one you suggest.
also i have already saturated current 5 ports on my mobo ,
just one remaining.
pls suggest,am not looking for any fancy stuff.just good sata card.
 
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hammer256

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Mar 26, 2011
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Just an update, cards came in yesterday in a very nicely packed box. Flashed the firmware per Chris's post, and it's working very nicely now. Did run into a bit of problem when the card didn't detect any drives, but turns out to be a cable problem. Lesson learned: don't buy some generic sas breakout cable and expect it work.

Now running in raid 1 and using dd to clone the system drive to the array.
 
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adamantinepiggy

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May 29, 2010
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Mine also came in a well-expanding foam padded box and anti-static bag. Mine also came with a standard size support brace. Haven't actually messed with it yet though.
 
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hammer256

Member
Mar 26, 2011
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Yeah, the cards I got also have mounting brackets on them. Also, works well in the pci-e x4 slot on my P55 mobo (MSI P55-GD65).

I don't see an os x flash utility, but it shouldn't be very difficult to boot into a linux boot cd and flash from there.
 
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Emulex

Diamond Member
Jan 28, 2001
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no i mean an actual rom or kext to make it boot off. osx is picky on its hardware
 
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ChrisBenn

Junior Member
Oct 6, 2001
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In IT mode will OS X not boot off of it? You may have issues in IR mode with OS X (i'm not sure, win 7 & solaris have drivers built in for it so didn't have to mess with that in either case) - but I would think it should work fine in IT mode (probably means no raid-0/1/10 if that's what you want though)

And yeah, there's no sas2flash utility for OS X afaik. Probably can flash form a virtual machine if you do a full Vt-d PCIe passthrough, but never tried it.
 
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ChrisBenn

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Oct 6, 2001
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