What is a good raid card?

[Bellweather]

I know nothing about the different kind of raid cards, but I know I want to run Raid 0. Is there any card that is especially good or especially bad? I'm thinking about converting over to raid, but I'm not sure it's worth the price ($Maxtor 30Gig 7200 + $Raid Card).

 

[n0cmonkey]

Make sure you get a real hardware raid card instead of a bios assisted software raid controller

 

[Bellweather]

Yes, I remember reading something on anand about that not too long ago. If I remember correctly the hardware raid cards were rather pricey. Probably for a reason.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< Yes, I remember reading something on anand about that not too long ago. If I remember correctly the hardware raid cards were rather pricey. Probably for a reason. >>



Yeah, I think the 3ware escalade are hardware based and I am almost positive the promise cards are more software with bios assisting. I think I read that on one of the OpenBSD mailing list...

 

[Athlon4all]

You mean Software RAID. Hardware RAID has on-board mini-CPU's, and are designed for RAID 5. Software is meant for RAID 0 and 1 and the CPU does the work. I'd get Iwill's SIDE RAID 100, it was the highest performer in Anand's comparision.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< You mean Software RAID. Hardware RAID has on-board mini-CPU's, and are designed for RAID 5. Software is meant for RAID 0 and 1 and the CPU does the work. I'd get Iwill's SIDE RAID 100, it was the highest performer in Anand's comparision. >>



Thanks for the explanation. Ill be checking out the raid info when I get a chance and I think bellweather probably will too. My problem is trying to find chipsets these cards are using so I can see if they will work in my systems or not

 

[kylef]

Yeah, and unfortunately &quot;supported&quot; means different things to different people, unfortunately. I can't remember whether it was FreeBSD 4.2 or 4.3 that announced &quot;support&quot; for IDE-based raid controller chipsets, so I got all excited and tried it out...

It worked for a few minutes, but 3 kernel panics later I decided the drivers weren't where they needed to be yet...

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< Yeah, and unfortunately &quot;supported&quot; means different things to different people, unfortunately. I can't remember whether it was FreeBSD 4.2 or 4.3 that announced &quot;support&quot; for IDE-based raid controller chipsets, so I got all excited and tried it out...

It worked for a few minutes, but 3 kernel panics later I decided the drivers weren't where they needed to be yet... >>



that is one of the reasons I am also looking at scsi. I know I dont have the money for scsi right now (or ide for that matter) because of the new ibook. But I have connections on the OpenBSD team that I can ask what thier opinions of certain drivers are