Planning on RAID 5. Get a dedicated raid card?

[smakme7757]

Hi all,

I'm going to be running 4x 1TB drives in RAID 5. I'm currently running a P67 chipset on my system and am wondering if a dedicated RAID card would be worthwhile seeing as the RAID will be storing a backup of my backup and i want it to work as well as possible.

I can't spend $1300 on a top of the line raid card, but i'd be prepaired to pay $250 for a decent RAID card if it would increase the reliability of the RAID.

Thank you .

 

[Ayah]

Raid5 on Intel southbridges write at like 35MB/s on Win7. Maybe slightly more if you're lucky.

Fork over like 100$ for a Perc6i with a BBU and you can probably push triple or quadruple that.

 

[smakme7757]

Raid5 on Intel southbridges write at like 35MB/s on Win7. Maybe slightly more if you're lucky.

Fork over like 100$ for a Perc6i with a BBU and you can probably push triple or quadruple that.

I have a choice between these brands for raid cards:

• HighPoint
• Promise
• Sunsway
• SDM

 

[Ayah]

I really push people on budgets towards the Perc 6i for one major reason: it's significantly cheaper than comparable alternatives, sitting at the ~100-140$ mark with a BBU.

The closest thing I can find is the Highpoint RocketRAID 3520 @ ~250$, but as far as I can tell, no BBU.

 

[smakme7757]

whats a BBU?

 

[Ayah]

Battery Backup Unit.

 

[Emulex]

or just do raid-10 and use a cheapo LSI card. I have cheap ones $50 with 8 sas/sata fan-out cable. the LSI ones that all ZFS/opensolaris folks want. you can save so much by using this low cost solution up to 8 drives that you can afford to splurge on the drives and do raid-10 which is FAR faster. or do a ZFS opensolaris build and use the cards as non-raid. fifty bones with fanout cables

 

[Plugers]

or just do raid-10 and use a cheapo LSI card. I have cheap ones $50 with 8 sas/sata fan-out cable. the LSI ones that all ZFS/opensolaris folks want. you can save so much by using this low cost solution up to 8 drives that you can afford to splurge on the drives and do raid-10 which is FAR faster. or do a ZFS opensolaris build and use the cards as non-raid. fifty bones with fanout cables

Which card is this? I have 6x 2tb sitting on my desk and want to pick up 2 more to start my build.

 

[Mark R]

Which card is this? I have 6x 2tb sitting on my desk and want to pick up 2 more to start my build.

You can often get LSI SAS2008 chipset cards very cheap - e.g. IBM Serveraid MR10i.

These are little better than software RAID - no cache RAM, and a very weak CPU. But they're fine for RAID 1 or RAID 0. However, you do get 8 SAS/SATA ports (6 GBps for the MR10i), which are potentially configurable as regular (non-RAID) ports.

 

[Plugers]

Hmm MR10i is showing prices of $300+, $150 on ebay. Am i better off just getting THIS?

 

[Emulex]

br10i - with 2 4 port fanout's $50 man. that's fair.

 

[smakme7757]

I decided to drop the RAID idea for now, but got 1x 1.5GB WD Black and 2x 2TB Samsung F4.

They will replace 2x WD Black 640GB and 1x WD 500GB

 

[dclive]

I really push people on budgets towards the Perc 6i for one major reason: it's significantly cheaper than comparable alternatives, sitting at the ~100-140$ mark with a BBU.

The closest thing I can find is the Highpoint RocketRAID 3520 @ ~250$, but as far as I can tell, no BBU.

Speaking of the 6i, with SATA drives and whitebox hardware, how do you handle the physical drive connections?