PCI-express Hardware RAID 1 ONLY

[Weatherton]

I am growing a bit weary of the expense and relative complexity involved with RAID 5 solutions. Is there a PCI-express card out there that has multiple pairs of ports, the function of which is purely mirroring?

I want to have pairs of ports that I know will do nothing but store the same contents on two drives. So:

Pair 1 stores 500GB of data on two 500GB drives
Pair 2 stores 1.5TB of data on two 1.5TB drives
etc.

I am hoping to have 4 pairs.

 

[XR250rdr]

The LSI LSI00151 is an 8 port PCIe RAID 0, 1 card, but runs close to $300. Most cards with 8 ports are going to support RAID5.

The only card I've found so far that is purely RAID 1 is a PCI-X SCSI card from LSI.

 

[taltamir]

mirroring is the ONLY raid i would trust a motherboard controller to do, and do well. My second choice (not as reliable as the mobo controllers), is a cheap "software" controller that is 20-30$ and has good reviews.

Since if you take any of the two drives to ANY other machine, it will simply detect it as a regular, raidless drive, with data on it (and you can make a raid1 out of it by copying its data to a second drive).

Most motherboards have enough ports to do two raid1 pairs. And it is a good idea to use that for storage. It gets pricy if you need massive storage arrays (many many drives), but for a few drives it is actually cheaper. And the only downside is that windows doesn't do ZFS, so you don't have built in checksumming and error correction for data protection (although I have heard there are programs that would do it for you manually for specific files)

 

[Keitero]

As XR250rdr said, most of your higher port number cards will at least do RAID5. Very few will do RAID 0/1 since most people who are looking for more than 2 ports are planning on doing RAID5/6.

 

[taltamir]

and it locks you in to using their card

(raid1, you just take one of the drives, put it in any system, and it shows up as a non raid drive containing all your data... other raid implementations require you to keep using the same controller, so if it fails, you replace it with the same one. even if not the best deal anymore)