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What RAID card should I get?

J

JohnVM

Member
I just got 4 WD2500JD's -- 1TB total (4x250GB). I have 2 SATA ports on my mobo, but I want to have all the drives running in RAID0 (and I need 2 more ports anyway), so I was wondering what RAID card should I get? I'm running Windows XP. Cost isn't really an issue, although within reason.
 
Oh, also, the drives were OEM. Any suggestions as to types of cables to get? (I don't have any special SATA cables at all atm I don't think) - all IDE.
 
How do you plan to back up that monster? RAID-0 is notoriously risky. Anywho, I was wondering if it would be possible to add another two channel SATA card with the same logic chips as the on-board and have them work all together as one RAID array... what SATA logic is resident on your mobo?
.bh.
 
Back it up? Not really planning on doing that -- no way do I have space, or money for that matter, to get another 1TB of these things + another RAID card.

As for logic? My board is the Asus P4P800 Deluxe.
 
Here

This is the card i have running my (4) 200gig SATA Wd's in Raid 5. It's a 4 port SATA raid card. I love this card and it's much better than most. Don't buy the highpoint card because it will eat your cpu.

here it is on newegg

Here
 
About backing it up - well, I dont really want to make anyone give me a big lesson, but could you tell me briefly what the difference between RAID0/RAID5 is? I know a LITTLE bit about them, but not much.

My main concern is having a lot of space, and I was under the impression that RAID0 is the way to do that -- if theres a better solution please let me know.
 
I only have a little knowledge of RAID but as i understand, RAID 0 has zero redundency meaning if 1 of the 4 drives fail, u lose the lot of data. RAID 5 while might not have the same space availabe, does have redundency but i can't tell u how much
 
Oh another thing.. RAID 5 only covers 1 drive failure, ie, I got 6 drive raid 5, if 1 drive fail, it'll work by calculating parity bit, if 2 drive fails, I'm fubared.
 
Are you sure you should get RAID in the first place?
For normal use it isn't faster than a single disk.

Of course, if you're going to run huge multi-user systems or maybe a big database server, then go ahead.
If you just want speed and disk space for your desktop system, I'd recommend not using RAID.

The latency goes up because you need to read from two disks simultaneously, meaning you always have to wait for the slowest disk seek to access a file.

Sure, bandwidth goes up as well, which would be handy in the above scenarios, or if you want to copy a 4gig file. But under normal use? Don't bother with RAID.

It's a nice technology for what it's made for, but it's also extremely hyped and misunderstood.
 
Originally posted by: JohnVM
About backing it up - well, I dont really want to make anyone give me a big lesson, but could you tell me briefly what the difference between RAID0/RAID5 is? I know a LITTLE bit about them, but not much.

My main concern is having a lot of space, and I was under the impression that RAID0 is the way to do that -- if theres a better solution please let me know.
Click to expand...

Anandtech FAQ on RAID

In summary though:
RAID 0 - striping. You get all the space of all the drives, and speed, but zero redundancy. If one fails, wave goodbye to all of your data.

RAID 5 - striping with parity. You lose one drive's worth of space, but if any one drive fails, you lose some speed, but no data. When you get a replacement drive, plug it in, and in a few hours, all will be well. It takes the controller awhile to read the data and the parity stripes, and calculate what the original data on the replaced drive should be. So you get speed and fault-tolerance, at the expense of the space of one drive.

I've got a Promise SX4000 - it is probably the PATA parent of the SATA thing that Fuchs linked to. It has higher CPU usage than most other hardware-based RAID 5 cards, but it is still negligible - maybe 5%. It doesn't even show up on my CPU usage graph.

Oh yeah, quick thing about the SX150 - it needs RAM. Check Promise's page for what it supports; I used 128MB PC100 ECC RAM in my SX4000.

For normal use it isn't faster than a single disk.
Click to expand...
How many single disks are there that can manage sustained, not burst speeds, of 85MB/sec? Not a huge increase, but it's definitely faster. And my SX4000 very nearly saturates the PCI bus when I'm testing burst speeds. If I had it on a 66MHz PCI bus, it'd probably do better. Access times though aren't much different than a single drive.

For the record, I've got two PC's - my main system uses two standalone disks. My secondary is now a fileserver and safe haven for data, but also a video editing station. RAID 5 gave it redundancy and speed.
 
How often do drives really fail though? I have about 650GB in this system at the moment, (a 200, 2 120's and some 80's) and ive never had a HDD straight up fail. I've had some get corrupt sectors, but never completely fail -- would a corrupt sector ruin the RAID array?

I'm going to be using this 1TB mainly for storage of large files -- I'm going to be purchasing 2 74GB 10,000RPM SATA Raptors to use for my windows drive, which I was also planning in running in RAID0. I format about once a month so I'm not too worried about losing any data on my Windows drive, everything important I keep on my storage drive(s).
 
The P4P800 deluxe has a Promise SATA controller on it. So for the cheapest solution, go with either a Promise 2 channel add on card or a SiliconImage based card (like the Syba from dealsonic.com or the LSI ($36) or BusLink ($30.) from newegg) and run two separate RAID-0 arrays. At least in the case of a crash, you would only lose half your data... You could also run them as JABOD where the two drives act as one large drive but without the speed advantage (but higher risk) of striping.
. Else get a RAID-5 card for at least a little data security at the cost of a drive's worth of space. I was looking for a simple 4-channel SATA RAID card, but the ones I found don't seem to be highly regarded by their owners...
.bh.

Where's the :sun: ?
 
I'm looking at this card here: http://www.pc-pitstop.com/ide_raid/9500S_8.asp

It looks pretty good, anyone know much about it? It's a bit pricey but as far as I can tell it may be worth the money. You guys have convinced me that RAID0 probably is not the best way to go, so now I'm thinking about getting one-two more 250GB and running RAID5, plus my 2 raptors = 7-8 drives, so I now need an 8 port (which is what this is) SATA RAID card.

Any feedback would be great.
 
Keep in mind....if you have 650g, how do you back it up? If one drive dies....it's all gone if its in raid 0. Raid 5 provides a safety net with Little speed loss.

If you're building a TB without redundancy, you're just asking for a huge headache if something goes wrong.

I have 4 200gig and get about 550 or so gig in raid 5. It's well worth it since I would have no way of backing up data if something goes wrong.

You have to have identical drives in an array, so the whole "waiting for the slowest drive to speed up" isn't really a factor.

I know it seems like wasting money when you arent "using" a drive in an array, but think of the headache when all your data goes bye bye...
 
A coworker of mine has the escalade, its one of the most popular and a good card. You'd want to run that on a machine with 64bit slots and a nice Gig lan card 😉
 
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