What's a good Raid card?

[snidy]

I want to run Raid 0 on 2 80 gig hard drives. What's a good quality PCI card?

 

[LED]

Originally posted by: snidy
I want to run Raid 0 on 2 80 gig hard drives. What's a good quality PCI card?

Highpoint =Good performance/price
IMO

 

[Budman]

Originally posted by: LED

Originally posted by: snidy
I want to run Raid 0 on 2 80 gig hard drives. What's a good quality PCI card?

Highpoint =Good performance/price
IMO

Highpoint = CRAP
IMO

Promise = good.

 

[SickBeast]

i had nothing but stability problems when i ran raid-0 on my highpoint card. it was really fast when it was working tho.

 

[chizow]

After running a few softRAID cards, I spent a little more and picked up a 3ware Escalade 7000-2 hardware RAID card ($120-$130). This card will ONLY do RAID 0, RAID 1, or JBOD. 3ware uses RAID 10 for redundant striped arrays, so you'll need the 7500-4 if thats what you want ($250-$300).

Killer card, just make sure you upgrade your partition to dynamic disk in XP/2000. My scores are through the roof now in ATTO or any other free bench (diskpeed32, diskbench, sandra). Read speeds are almost 90MBps starting with the 16 block in ATTO, Write speeds are almost 70MBps starting with the same block. If someone wants to host my results, I'll e-mail you the printscreen.

CPU utilization is anywhere from 50%-80% less than any of the softRAID cards b/c the 3ware and any other hardware RAID card have dedicated math coprocessors.

As for SoftRAID cards, the Highpoint Rocketraid 133 seems to be the highest performing softRAID card available, but I'd also keep an eye out for Silicon Image (Sil680) based cards. I had a Koutech using that chip and it benched extremely well, I returned it b/c the LED headers didn't work and softRAID cards CPU utilization was a bit high for my tastes.

Chiz

 

[snidy]

What's the differance in SoftRaid and hardware Raid? Sorry, I'm new to Raid.

 

[Jeff7]

I use the Highpoint controller that's onboard my Shuttle AK35GTR motherboard; it seems to be working fine, once I used the driver version to match the BIOS version. I've heard good things about Promise boards though.
The difference, performance-wise between software and hardware, I'm not sure; I assume that hardware RAID would be faster.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: snidy
What's the differance in SoftRaid and hardware Raid? Sorry, I'm new to Raid.

softRAID cards are basically ATA controllers with a bootable BIOS, which allows you to configure/boot from the Array. Your CPU/software/drivers/system memory still end up being used for the RAID calculations. hardRAID cards have dedicated math co-processors and an onboard cache that perform RAID striping, mirroring, and parity calculations (RAID 5 only). Most softRAID cards are fine for RAID 0, but once you get into RAID 10, RAID 5 or even RAID 0+1, performance can drop significantly while eating up more CPU cycles. If your using your rig for mostly games, I wouldn't worry about hardware RAID, as your CPU shouldn't really be loaded while the HDD is loading games. If you're doing multimedia editing/recording/encoding/decoding work, you may want to consider using a hardRAID card, as you'll benefit from the lower CPU utilization. My benches (both synthetic and real-world) are significantly faster though with the hardRAID card.

Chiz

 

[Pariah]

For RAID 0, it doesn't matter if you go hardware or software, as the RAID calculations are practically nil, especially with only a 2 drive array. Performance will be similar and CPU hit is practically non-existent.

CPU utilization is anywhere from 50%-80% less than any of the softRAID cards b/c the 3ware and any other hardware RAID card have dedicated math coprocessors.

Where are you getting those numbers from? Take a look at SR's IOmeter results. For RAID 0, 3Ware is typically 2-3times more CPU intensive than the "software" cards. Sure we're talking the difference between 1% and 3%, which means nothing, but hardware doesn't automatically mean lower CPU utilization, especially with RAID 0.

 

[chizow]

Originally posted by: Pariah
For RAID 0, it doesn't matter if you go hardware or software, as the RAID calculations are practically nil, especially with only a 2 drive array. Performance will be similar and CPU hit is practically non-existent.

CPU utilization is anywhere from 50%-80% less than any of the softRAID cards b/c the 3ware and any other hardware RAID card have dedicated math coprocessors.

Where are you getting those numbers from? Take a look at SR's IOmeter results. For RAID 0, 3Ware is typically 2-3times more CPU intensive than the "software" cards. Sure we're talking the difference between 1% and 3%, which means nothing, but hardware doesn't automatically mean lower CPU utilization, especially with RAID 0.

Hmm, well I've spent the last month finding an acceptable RAID card for my needs (Adaptec 1200A (HPT370), Koutech IOFLEX(Sil680), and a refurbed Highpoint RocketRAID 133 (HPT372)), so I'm getting my results from my desktop. Where are you getting your numbers? Considering I don't see any of those cards in any of your rigs, I'm just going to assume your talking out of your poo-hole again (but it seems you've been doing a lot of that lately). I'm basing CPU utilization off of windows task manager while the benches are running, as well as diskspeed32 which has a built-in CPU utlization graph. I'd be glad to share my results with my 3ware if you'd like to see them, as I'm sure there's no way you would know unless you owned one.

Chiz

 

[LED]

Software vs Hardware RAID