Controller Card Recommendation Needed

[PTNL]

Looking to have 4 x 500 GB (or 750 GB) SATA hard drives in a RAID-5 array in a machine that will be used as a dumb file storage for me and a few friends, so I'm not expecting a heavy load. Motherboard is an Asus desktop board, so PCI is all I can do for card connections. Operating system will be XP Pro.

I don't have a problem spending a couple hundred bucks if necessary. I looked around on Newegg, but it seems that 4-port SATA controller card that has any RAID-5 functionality seems to use PCIx or PCIe mobo connections. I've used Promise and Adaptec before, and I like both but am not hard-set on just those two brands, I'm just not wanting to drop some coin on crap hardware.

Any recommendations (and reasons why)?

TIA !!

[PTNL]

Figures ... As soon as I make a post, I find a possible card.

Anyone have any experience with this card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816102085

[jbrukardt]

Expect really slow writes (20mb/s or less) with anything other than a 3ware or an areca

[I(illa Bee]

I have that card, and it bigger brother with real hardware raid 5.

The 4310 is good little card. I prefer it to a on board solution. Dont worry, my writes are much more than 20mb/s. Thats BS that it wont. Also, I had a 4 disk raid 5 array on it, and when one drive failed it was able to rebuild the array with a replacement with no problems. So it worked!

You should know, that its not real hardware, its hardware assisted.

[PTNL]

Thanks for the follow-ups on this.

jbrukardt -- Do you have an alternate recommendation, and a product link to go with it?

I(illa Bee -- I'm not familiar with the difference between "pure hardware" and "hardware assisted". Other than performance, what differences would I notice in how the arrays are initially setup, maintained, BIOS screens, etc.?

[Ockie]

You know you can always stick a PCI-X card in a PCI slot ;) The bandwidth is less but since it's just bulk space, it shouldn't really matter.

[I(illa Bee]

Thanks for the follow-ups on this.

jbrukardt -- Do you have an alternate recommendation, and a product link to go with it?

I(illa Bee -- I'm not familiar with the difference between "pure hardware" and "hardware assisted". Other than performance, what differences would I notice in how the arrays are initially setup, maintained, BIOS screens, etc.?

you wouldn't notice any real difference in the BIOS.. although more expensive cards I have used have had more detailed and tunable BIOS options. A software or "hardware assisted" is pretty muchthe same thing. Promise just like to call is "hardware assisted" instead o jsut saying "software"

Software RAID 5 is gonna be slow i think.

[PTNL]

you wouldn't notice any real difference in the BIOS.. although more expensive cards I have used have had more detailed and tunable BIOS options. A software or "hardware assisted" is pretty muchthe same thing. Promise just like to call is "hardware assisted" instead o jsut saying "software"

Software RAID 5 is gonna be slow i think.
Thanks for the info. I'd rather stay away from software-based RAID. Do you have a better card suggestion?

[fri2219]

In order to see an increase in disk performance, you have to cross a price threshold of somewhere around $300-$400. Brands I'd buy in that range include Areca, 3ware, and LSI Logic.


At the price range of the Promise Card mentioned, you're not going to see anything that's much better than a new motherboard that supports something along the lines of Intel's Matrix RAID. In fact, the drivers and stability are likely to be much worse for a card in that range than a decent Intel motherboard.


That said, I'd guess that the network will be more of a rate limiting factor than any disk access in your circumstance. That's even for "gigabyte" Ethernet over UTP.

[PTNL]

In order to see an increase in disk performance, you have to cross a price threshold of somewhere around $300-$400. Brands I'd buy in that range include Areca, 3ware, and LSI Logic.


At the price range of the Promise Card mentioned, you're not going to see anything that's much better than a new motherboard that supports something along the lines of Intel's Matrix RAID. In fact, the drivers and stability are likely to be much worse for a card in that range than a decent Intel motherboard.


That said, I'd guess that the network will be more of a rate limiting factor than any disk access in your circumstance. That's even for "gigabyte" Ethernet over UTP.
Looking into different brands other than Promise and Adaptec seem to coming up more often. Therefore, will any PCIX card work in a PCI socket? Obviously there won't be the full performance associated with the PCIX bandwidth, but the gain I would make would be having 6 or 8 SATA drives in a RAID-5 array.

I can accept the network speed being the limitation. For the record, the network layout has a Sonicwall TZ150 and a Dell PowerConnect 5324 GbE switch.

The 300-400 dollar amount for the controller card is not a problem so long as it's justified. And from what I've seen so far from everyone's comments, the benefits justify the dollar cost.

I'm not familiar with the Areca or LSI cards, so does anyone have a 4-8 port SATA card recommendation?

[PTNL]

any controller card suggestions?

[unhappy_mage]

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