looking for a Raid 5 card for home server

[smartermoney]

i have setup a home server using M$ SBS 2005 and i am using it as a file server as well as a ftp and we server. I have ALL my files on it so i can access it from anywhere and have my pics and videos anywhere. I have mirrored the original drive and have filled it up so now i was mirroring the second when it hit me...
BAMM>......
why use all these drives when you can have more space and run raid 5

am i correct? i know that SBS will do it software but i have heard that software is not as fast or reliable.
so......
looking for suggestions for a hardware raid 5 card. Currently all my drives are eide not sata.

amd 3200=+
asus k8v se deluxe
1gb ram

 

[jose]

Look for some older models of 3Ware ide raid cards.

 

[Jeff7]

I mention my Promise SX4000 card whenever RAID 5 is brought up. The SX4060 is the newer model - it's got 64MB of RAM soldered right to the card.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Jeff7
I mention my Promise SX4000 card whenever RAID 5 is brought up. The SX4060 is the newer model - it's got 64MB of RAM soldered right to the card.

I'm using the SATA version of this card, and it's worked very well in my HTPC/fileserver. I assume the IDE card (which is basically the same thing without the hardwired SATA->IDE converters) would also work well.

 

[smartermoney]

looking at the Promise SX4000, it takes onboard ram. What kind and how much would you install?
where to get. tried newegg but no avail?

lastlay how would i move my current install of os (mirrored 250gb via onboard raid) to the raid 5?

i see the SX4060 only supports 4 eide drives. thought a raid 5 had 5 drives?

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: smartermoney
looking at the Promise SX4000, it takes onboard ram. What kind and how much would you install?
where to get. tried newegg but no avail?

lastlay how would i move my current install of os (mirrored 250gb via onboard raid) to the raid 5?

i see the SX4060 only supports 4 eide drives. thought a raid 5 had 5 drives?

RAID-5 requires a minimum of three drives.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: Phil

Originally posted by: smartermoney
looking at the Promise SX4000, it takes onboard ram. What kind and how much would you install?
where to get. tried newegg but no avail?

lastlay how would i move my current install of os (mirrored 250gb via onboard raid) to the raid 5?

i see the SX4060 only supports 4 eide drives. thought a raid 5 had 5 drives?

RAID-5 requires a minimum of three drives.

Yup, 3 drives; if you want more than 4 drives, you'll need to get the SX6000, which is a huge card - "full length PCI". I think it's something like 13.5" long if I remember right.


Anyway, I personally think that ECC RAM is a good idea for it - might as well try and keep your data safe. My SX4000 has a stick of ECC PC100 128MB in there, bought on the FS/T forum. It damn near saturates the PCI bus (PCI bus speed is 133MB/sec) when it's doing a buffered read, and usually manages 100MB/sec when just doing a regular linear or random read - those numbers are according to AIDA32's Disk Benchmark plugin.

 

[KK]

Originally posted by: Jeff7

Originally posted by: Phil

Originally posted by: smartermoney
looking at the Promise SX4000, it takes onboard ram. What kind and how much would you install?
where to get. tried newegg but no avail?

lastlay how would i move my current install of os (mirrored 250gb via onboard raid) to the raid 5?

i see the SX4060 only supports 4 eide drives. thought a raid 5 had 5 drives?

RAID-5 requires a minimum of three drives.

Yup, 3 drives; if you want more than 4 drives, you'll need to get the SX6000, which is a huge card - "full length PCI". I think it's something like 13.5" long if I remember right.


Anyway, I personally think that ECC RAM is a good idea for it - might as well try and keep your data safe. My SX4000 has a stick of ECC PC100 128MB in there, bought on the FS/T forum. It damn near saturates the PCI bus (PCI bus speed is 133MB/sec) when it's doing a buffered read, and usually manages 100MB/sec when just doing a regular linear or random read - those numbers are according to AIDA32's Disk Benchmark plugin.

I have the sx6000 card with 256mb ram in it and 5 drives attached, seems to work alright. Have had it for about 3-4 years and no trouble.

 

[smartermoney]

ok i picked up the sx6000 for a reasonable price. What size ram should i be running. 32mb ok?

and lastly how do i get the original os that is on the mirror raid 1 to the raid 5? can i ghost it?

 

[imported_Kensai]

32mb is "okay" but 256MB-512MB is better,

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: Kensai
32mb is "okay" but 256MB-512MB is better,

You've never used a RAID card before, have you? :roll:

512Mb on a RAID card for a home user.... what will these noobies come up with next. :roll:

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: Phil

Originally posted by: Kensai
32mb is "okay" but 256MB-512MB is better,

You've never used a RAID card before, have you? :roll:

512Mb on a RAID card for a home user.... what will these noobies come up with next. :roll:

how much will a BASIC raid 5 controller cost and how good r they (raid controller for home especially raid 5 ones lol)?

the only raid i dealt with are at work (this raid at home is ridiculous unless u WORK at home)

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: kobymu

Originally posted by: Phil

Originally posted by: Kensai
32mb is "okay" but 256MB-512MB is better,

You've never used a RAID card before, have you? :roll:

512Mb on a RAID card for a home user.... what will these noobies come up with next. :roll:

how much will a BASIC raid 5 controller cost and how good r they (raid controller for home especially raid 5 ones lol)?

the only raid i dealt with are at work (this raid at home is ridiculous unless u WORK at home)

From a data security, as well as speed, point of view, RAID is not ridiculous.

Secondly, learn to type. It's "you" and "are". If you can spend the time to type ridiculous and controller, you can type "you" and "are". If you're working with RAID devices at work, then I'll assume you older than 18, which makes it even worse.

 

[erwos]

"From a data security, as well as speed, point of view, RAID is not ridiculous. "

I totally agree. The general hard drive failure rate alone is enough to make it so that RAID 1 or 5 at home is a necessity. You also don't need _need_ a hardware RAID controller, especially if you run Linux or something similar - software RAID works just fine. I admin several RAIDs at work that use Linux software RAID, in fact.

I've lost 3 hard drives in the past year, and a fourth is on its last legs (fails a couple SMART tests due to age). I don't trust CD-Rs or DVD-Rs, either - they are almost all _far_ too prone to failure after a couple years.

Put it this way: I can put togther a RAID 5 with five Seagate 120gb drives (this includes the extra drive!), a four bay Firewire enclosure, and five mobile racks (this includes the extra rack) for about $400 (BB is selling the drives for $50 this week!). It doesn't have a fancy RAID controller, but then again, I don't have to turn off the entire computer to swap the drives, just the enclosure. Considering that an external 400gb drive all on its own costs around $350 (and comes with a paltry 1-3 year warranty - even the Seagate one, oddly enough), you're gaining a stunning amount of reliability for $40 and a very small bit of your time (think an hour or two total).

My time is worth money, and that's why I'm moving to RAID.

-Erwos

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: Phil

Secondly, learn to type. It's "you" and "are". If you can spend the time to type ridiculous and controller, you can type "you" and "are". If you're working with RAID devices at work, then I'll assume you older than 18, which makes it even worse.

lets compare my english with ANY OF YOUR SECONDARY LANGUAGES (do you even know how to write in more then one language? or talk a secound language? bhh...)

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: Phil
From a data security, as well as speed, ...

data security? ever herd of backups?

speed? in which application? and how much of a speed gain per $?

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: erwos
"From a data security, as well as speed, point of view, RAID is not ridiculous. "

I totally agree. The general hard drive failure rate alone is enough to make it so that RAID 1 or 5 at home is a necessity. You also don't need _need_ a hardware RAID controller, especially if you run Linux or something similar - software RAID works just fine. I admin several RAIDs at work that use Linux software RAID, in fact.

I've lost 3 hard drives in the past year, and a fourth is on its last legs (fails a couple SMART tests due to age). I don't trust CD-Rs or DVD-Rs, either - they are almost all _far_ too prone to failure after a couple years.

Put it this way: I can put togther a RAID 5 with five Seagate 120gb drives (this includes the extra drive!), a four bay Firewire enclosure, and five mobile racks (this includes the extra rack) for about $400 (BB is selling the drives for $50 this week!). It doesn't have a fancy RAID controller, but then again, I don't have to turn off the entire computer to swap the drives, just the enclosure. Considering that an external 400gb drive all on its own costs around $350 (and comes with a paltry 1-3 year warranty - even the Seagate one, oddly enough), you're gaining a stunning amount of reliability for $40 and a very small bit of your time (think an hour or two total).

My time is worth money, and that's why I'm moving to RAID.

-Erwos

you'r time is worth money if you work (work = paid money for action taken), hence my statement "work at home".
"lost 3 hard drives in the past year",i lost more then 20 the last year and it is still not ECONOMICAL for my company to deploy raid (especially raid5) on ANY of the workstation
"...that use Linux software RAID" ok you didnt bought a hardware raid you just bought a cpu, mb, and ram AND deployed an os (unless you use the SPARE cpu resource in which case you BOUGHT TOO MUCH CPU AND RAM and how much did you payed fot THAT?)

 

[KK]

Originally posted by: kobymu

Originally posted by: erwos
"From a data security, as well as speed, point of view, RAID is not ridiculous. "

I totally agree. The general hard drive failure rate alone is enough to make it so that RAID 1 or 5 at home is a necessity. You also don't need _need_ a hardware RAID controller, especially if you run Linux or something similar - software RAID works just fine. I admin several RAIDs at work that use Linux software RAID, in fact.

I've lost 3 hard drives in the past year, and a fourth is on its last legs (fails a couple SMART tests due to age). I don't trust CD-Rs or DVD-Rs, either - they are almost all _far_ too prone to failure after a couple years.

Put it this way: I can put togther a RAID 5 with five Seagate 120gb drives (this includes the extra drive!), a four bay Firewire enclosure, and five mobile racks (this includes the extra rack) for about $400 (BB is selling the drives for $50 this week!). It doesn't have a fancy RAID controller, but then again, I don't have to turn off the entire computer to swap the drives, just the enclosure. Considering that an external 400gb drive all on its own costs around $350 (and comes with a paltry 1-3 year warranty - even the Seagate one, oddly enough), you're gaining a stunning amount of reliability for $40 and a very small bit of your time (think an hour or two total).

My time is worth money, and that's why I'm moving to RAID.

-Erwos

you'r time is worth money if you work (work = paid money for action taken), hence my statement "work at home".

Why all the negativity toward using raid 5 in a home environment? If one wants it, why not? Don't be jealous, it doesn't effect you.

 

[kobymu]

i like raid, and i'm not jealous, i'm just saying it is not worth the money unless there are special purpose
and i didnt even mention minuteness and troubleshooting.

 

[KK]

Originally posted by: kobymu
i like raid, and i'm not jealous, i'm just saying it is not worth the money unless there are special purpose

What do you purpose for someone that doesn't like to take time to back anything up? It's kinda nice to have the security of knowing that if one drive dies you won't be SOL. And with raid five only one drive worth of space is wasted for parity. There's some savings right there.

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: KK

Originally posted by: kobymu
i like raid, and i'm not jealous, i'm just saying it is not worth the money unless there are special purpose

What do you purpose for someone that doesn't like to take time to back anything up? It's kinda nice to have the security of knowing that if one drive dies you won't be SOL. And with raid five only one drive worth of space is wasted for parity. There's some savings right there.

if he's got some $$$ laying around doing noting then sure, why not, go for raid
just remember, going raid is not enough to prevent losing data. ie virus or human error for example. for data security you first and foremost backup, raid is added data security only not you'r primery data security

 

[Concillian]

Originally posted by: jose
Look for some older models of 3Ware ide raid cards.

Just realize that most 4 port 3Ware cards generally skimp on parity calculating hardware, and as such, write speeds tend to suffer when you use RAID 5.

Promise cards work as long as all you ever want to do with it is Windows. Their alternate OS support is horrid.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: kobymu

Originally posted by: Phil

Secondly, learn to type. It's "you" and "are". If you can spend the time to type ridiculous and controller, you can type "you" and "are". If you're working with RAID devices at work, then I'll assume you older than 18, which makes it even worse.

lets compare my english with ANY OF YOUR SECONDARY LANGUAGES (do you even know how to write in more then one language? or talk a secound language? bhh...)

I'm not disputing your grasp of secondary language(s), I'm pointing out that using "u" and "r" in place of "you" and "are" is utterly retarded.

 

[imported_Phil]

Originally posted by: kobymu

Originally posted by: Phil
From a data security, as well as speed, ...

data security? ever herd of backups?

Ever heard of a server's hard disk failing?
You've never actually worked with RAID on a personal level, have you?

speed? in which application? and how much of a speed gain per $?

You really are a moron. If you don't know about, for example, the gained STR by using a RAID-0 array then you should really think twice before posting on a topic that you clearly have minimal grasp over.

 

[kobymu]

Originally posted by: Phil

Originally posted by: kobymu

Originally posted by: Phil

Secondly, learn to type. It's "you" and "are". If you can spend the time to type ridiculous and controller, you can type "you" and "are". If you're working with RAID devices at work, then I'll assume you older than 18, which makes it even worse.

lets compare my english with ANY OF YOUR SECONDARY LANGUAGES (do you even know how to write in more then one language? or talk a secound language? bhh...)

I'm not disputing your grasp of secondary language(s), I'm pointing out that using "u" and "r" in place of "you" and "are" is utterly retarded.

it is just you'r opinion (maybe other feel the same but not everyone).
and try not to suggest that i am "utterly retarded", thats not very nice.
here, this one is on me :beer: