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RAID controller cards

Y

YBS1

Golden Member
Anyone know of any knocks or have any input on these RAID controller cards (specifically poor drivers, compatibility, etc.)? They will be used to RAID 0 two 128GB Indilinx Barefoot drives for my Steam folder, they aren't being used as an OS drive or anything else, so I don't need anything fancy or expensive. OS is Win 7 x64 on an X58 Intel and it needs to be a PCI-E 2.0 x1 card.

HighPoint RocketRAID 620
VANTEC UGT-IS602R
VANTEC UGT-IS100R
 
if it's just raid0 with 2 drives, there's no point in buying a dedicated controller. onboard raid will handle it fine. those controllers you linked are all software raid anyway. unless you need more SATA ports or something, there's no reason to get an external software raid controller.
 
I can't use onboard. My intel controller is set to ahci and has an ssd, two hdd's and two optical drives hooked up to it. I also have a Marvell SAS controller with two ports but it seems to have a severe firmware bug in that you can set up an array (in bios or using marvell raid utility within windows), but upon your first reboot one of the drives always falls out of the array. There doesn't seem to be any solution to this to be found after scouring the web. It's a Foxconn Bloodrage.
 
if you're reinstalling fresh, why not just set it to raid and leave the drives and disc drives alone? they're still going to operate just the same. i have a storage drive with dual SSDs in raid with a bd rom drive on an x58 chipset.

are there any bios updates for the board? that really sucks if you can't use the onboard raid due to immediate failure after a reboot. mine's been running for almost 2 years with G1 intel SSDs.

i'd go with the highpoint if you had no other option though..
 
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Why don't you use the OS to handle the mirror? Win7 can handle it easily. All those cards are offloading the work to the CPU anyway, just like the OS will.
 
Use that Marvell controller for the optical drives and you can run two different RAIDs on the same Intel chipset if needed.

Or doesn't the Marvell controller handle optical drives well?
 
Old Hippie said:
Use that Marvell controller for the optical drives and you can run two different RAIDs on the same Intel chipset if needed.

Or doesn't the Marvell controller handle optical drives well?
Click to expand...
I thought about doing that originally, but I was worried about that issue as well. I wasn't sure how that would complicate things if I ever needed to use the opticals to boot or in a non windows situation.
 
Evadman said:
Why don't you use the OS to handle the mirror? Win7 can handle it easily. All those cards are offloading the work to the CPU anyway, just like the OS will.
Click to expand...
I may just try that. I could swear though that for some reason the create as part of a "striped/mirror" array was grayed out though for whatever reason when I had them hooked up to the marvell controller during my initial attempts. Do you know if there is any trick to making this option available. Win 7 x64 Professional BTW.
 
you have to convert to dynamic disks before you can do a windows raid. did you make sure they were both dynamic?
 
Well, I hooked them both back up to the Marvell controller and set them up as a windows managed striped array and it worked. However, sequential read performance was horrid. I mean in the neighborhood of 30MBps (used to be ~370) horrid. Oddly, write speed while much slower than it should be wasn't off nearly as much, about 165MBps, the other numbers(512k, 4k, and 4k q32) all seemed normal though somewhat slower than when I was using this setup as my main drive hooked up to the intel controller in RAID mode. I then tried them as a simple spanned array and it performed as it should (albeit single drive performance). I'm pretty much out of ideas, I think the Marvell controller is a loss cause.
 
This solves it, the Marvell controller is absolute crap. I moved one of my hdd's to the marvell controller to make room for the two SSD's and then set them up again in a windows controlled stripe array. The results were much more inline with what one would expect. I believe I will get one of the controllers mentioned above as I don't care for the additional boot time the marvell being enabled adds to the process, nor am I sure I trust it's data integrity at this point.
CDMark.jpg
 
I believe I will get one of the controllers mentioned above as I don't care for the additional boot time the marvell being enabled adds to the process
Click to expand...
Any features you're not gonna use should be disabled in the BIOS but any expansion card is going to add another item for the BIOS to recognize.

You'll get rid of one but add another.

I'd be looking at the controller chips on the cards you mentioned for replacements.

For all I know they could use the same Marvell controller. 🙂
 
I know, this particular Marvell seems to take far longer to initialize than any controller I've seen before though so just about anything should be an improvement. That Highpoint that I listed above seems to be a Marvell as well, so I may steer clear of it though it's a different chipset.
 
i have heard intel ,areca and lsi controllers are the best But there expensive.

I have been looking into this for a wile.I was thinking about buying 2 f4 samsungs and putting them in raid 0 but I dont know how much better hardware raid is over software raid or if either is worth it.
 
That Highpoint that I listed above seems to be a Marvell as well, so I may steer clear of it though it's a different chipset.
Click to expand...
The Marvell chipsets shipping with the new Intel boards seem to be much better and it may be the one that those cards are using.

I have an X58 MB and am not going to be upgrading soon but needed something with SATA 6Gb/s for my planned RAID0 Crucial drives.

I purchased an LSI 9240-4i and couldn't be happier with it's performance.

It's an expensive upgrade but fits the bill for me.
 
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