Need a RAID 5 controller card

[yh125d]

I plan on picking up a Corsair 800D when they come out, and filling the 4 hotswap bays with 1.5tb drives for a 4.5TB raid5 for all my media. However, I don't have a clue about controllers. I just need a basic card (though a good quality one) that will let me run a 4x1.5TB setup. I don't need any particular capabilities besides RAID 5, and any pci/pci-e interface will work, since I'm not too concerned about speed. It's just hosting my blu ray rips so as long as it can manage that, it's fine

I'm on vista64, if that matters

 

[jgigz]

We have some raid controller cards at work that are solid, I've never personally used them but 3ware and areca are well known brands, though fairly pricey. Its a mixed bag when it comes to HighPoint controllers.

 

[Emulex]

the cerc/perc and smartarray are top of the line. check for compatibility.

i picked up a p400 for $99 with cables off ebay with 512meg bbwc.

i doubt you will find many controllers like the compaq CISM line (basically any compaq raid controller in the last 10 years uses the same driver).

do not use consumer 1.5TB drives with a raid controller. jbod only. you will regret it if you don't follow my advice. RE3/RE4/NS/ES only.

 

[yh125d]

Why are raid edition drives "required"? People use non RE drives all the time in raid without any major problems that I've heard of. Why is it that now everyone is saying RE or no raid?



Please explain :\

 

[Emulex]

raid controller waits 8 seconds for a drive response or sees a smart critical error. drive is failed if response >8 or smart error (Certain types).

consumer drives will try to fix a sector for a while before it gives up. 0-30s let's say. might as well keep trying since the o/s doesn't mind and a the o/s probably doesn't know how to deal with a bad sector..

when doing alot of i/o say you are defragging; well that 0-30s the consumer drive will push more towards 30s. drive doesn't respond in the 8seconday.. oops raid controller marks drive as no good.

so you replace the drive.. guess what happens during the 12+ hour rebuild process if another drive throws an error? depending on the location and raid-level total raid failure.


This is really easy to reproduce with raid-5 (1 disk failure at most). Raid-6 or Raid-10 maybe not as easy.

intel matrix raid its easy do a raid-verify and watch for errors. there should be zero;never none.

 

[yh125d]

Hmm...

Well, I suppose I *could* do onboard raid 5 with my UD3P. Would that allow me to use consumer drives? If it's easy enough to set up I don't mind using the ICH10R for my controller. Would I be able to have a raid 5 using 4 of the 6 ports and still use the other two ports for a boot/optical drive? If I ever need to, would it be simple to migrate that array to a new motherboard with onboard raid 5?

 

[Emulex]

no ich raid is basically software raid. you might as well just run jbod.

i'm not posting this to be a pita; just to save you trouble. i had the same setup and it was cool writes were abysmal like 30meg/s writes (4 drive raid-5) super fast reads 350mb running windows 2008 hyper-v x64. awesome. then boom one failed.

ok no biggie. well after 8 hours of rebuilding. boom another failed. raid-gone. bye. done.

2nd try: two 750gb seagate 7200.11 in raid-1 ; boom first failed. during rebuild 2nd errored out and failed.

i would say raid-0 or jbod.

i've got raid-1 on my ich10r with two cheapo dell 250gb. about once a month (or anytime you reset or lose power) you have to do a verify raid integrity. it finds 3-6 issues during this 2 hour process and then its good.

you wanna take a guess why 450gb is the biggest(for the most part) SAS raid drive right now? mainline storage? 600gb is coming out soon.

btw software raid - don't do it. i did this with openfiler. those two 750gb (sent back and now refurbs) started timing out and my iscsi share went away. the host attached by iscsi was not amused.

 

[WalkingDead]

The Intel Raid Matrix is junk and most of HghPonts are also software raid junks. I will stay away from those and anything that uses Silcon Image chip. I only trust Areca, LSI/3Ware and maybe Adaptec. HighPoint does has few hardware raid cards but I still don't trust those. You don't need to use the uber expensive raid class drives if you get some WD black or blue label drives and use the utility to turn on TLER function. Not the green lable which has other issues with it.

Btw, I have a LSI 8-port SAS Raid controller for sale on the FS/FT section if you are interested.