Fatest PCI raid card?

T

TigerLord

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 11, 2007
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I've decided to buy 4x 2TB green drives for storage in my main rig but my mobo only has one PCI-E slot and it's being used by my soundcard.

So what's the fatest PCI RAID card I could get for ~300$?
 
You could pick up a decent PCI sound card on Ebay and then use the express slot for your raid card. PCI is limited to 133 MB/s
 
That's a crying shame, because I really love my soundcard.

If I did free the PCIe slot, which PCIe RAID card would you recommend in that price range?
 
@OP

What's the link width of your PCIe slot? x1? x4? What motherboard do you have? The one in your sig?
 
Those Green 2TB drives may not play well with many true hardware RAID controllers.
 
parityboy said:
@OP

What's the link width of your PCIe slot? x1? x4? What motherboard do you have? The one in your sig?
Click to expand...

My mobo's the EVGA Classified3. I'm using the onboard controller (Intel ICH10R Chipset) for my RAID0 array for my 2 SSD, but for 4x storage drives, I was told it might be better to get true hardware RAID.

I wasn't planning to use RAID5 at first, only RAID0, but I found the lack of redundancy for 8TB worth of data to be very dangerous.
 
Yes, RAID 0 would be very poor choice for those four drives. If you aren't using RAID 5, then just get a cheap HBA.
 
Yes, that's the very card I suggested for RAID 5 just a few posts back. As for them not being a good choice for RAID 5, there should be a large thread on this forum about TLER that will explain it all.
 
Yes, I took your suggestion seriously hence why I'm really considering the purchase :)

The specs say it doesn't include cables... do I need that special inverter cable or just long regular sata2 cables? I'll have to sleeve and pass them somehow, as not to disrupt the clean setup I now have.

Is the battery a worthwhile investment for someone who will use this as general storage and photo editing? (As you might have picked up, I'm not very literate when it comes to RAID technologies)
 
TigerLord said:
Why not? I'm genuinely curious. Are there 2Tb drives likely to do better?
Click to expand...

What he said:
Blue Fox said:
As for them not being a good choice for RAID 5, there should be a large thread on this forum about TLER that will explain it all.
Click to expand...

So you're better off with Hitachi or Samsung drives since they have better compatibility with many hardware RAID controllers out there.

TigerLord said:
RAID5 offers redundancy, does it not?
Click to expand...
Yes.

Just to be clear though: RAID IS NOT BACKUP! It does not protect against malicious or accidental corruption, modification, or deletion of data. All it does is guarantee uptime in the event of hardware failure.

TigerLord said:
The specs say it doesn't include cables... do I need that special inverter cable or just long regular sata2 cables?
Click to expand...
You need SFF-8087 to multi-lane SATA forward breakout cables. Something like this:
$16 - 3ware SFF-8087 to Multi-lane SATA Forward Break-out Cable

TigerLord said:
Is the battery a worthwhile investment for someone who will use this as general storage and photo editing? (As you might have picked up, I'm not very literate when it comes to RAID technologies)
Click to expand...
Yes.
 
Thank you very much for all your help, I truly appreciate your time!

So I've read about CCTL vs TLER.
So getting four of these would better suit my needs:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245
Fair price, too!

So, the battery at 200$ seems a steep investment
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118118&Tpk=battery for 9260

What kind of benefits does it give me? My understanding of RAID5 is that if I raid four 2TB drive, I'll have 4TB of usable space as the other 4TB will be used as redundancy in case one of the four drives fail. Is the battery going to increase performance that much?

Thanks again!
 
I don't think the battery is worth spending $200 on. It lets you use the RAID cards RAM for caching without risking data loss, but if you just write everything directly to the disk, you won't need it. For the things you'll be doing, it won't really make a difference.
 
RAID5 is single parity. You should end up with more like 6GB usable (pre format) and 'take away' one drive's worth of capacity for the distributed parity.

The BBU is to keep any pending cached writes on the RAID controller in memory until they can be committed in case of power failure or some sort of hardware failure. This will also boost performance enabling write caching, which is generally recommended to be DISABLED if you do not have a BBU.
 
I imagine a battery could be added safely later without rebuilding the array? Would make the initial setup cost easier to bare.
 
TigerLord said:
So, the battery at 200$ seems a steep investment
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118118&Tpk=battery for 9260
Click to expand...
Oops, I though it would be like $100 or something. I'll defer to the others about this issue.

TigerLord said:
My understanding of RAID5 is that if I raid four 2TB drive, I'll have 4TB of usable space as the other 4TB will be used as redundancy in case one of the four drives fail
Click to expand...

The equation for RAID 5 storage space is "N-1 x S" where N is the number of drives and S is the size of the smallest drive in the array. So in your case: 4 -1 x 2TB = 6TB of storage with RAID 5.
 
Alrighty then! Thanks so much!

While I order all this hardware, I'll have to figure out a way to change one of the plate in the hotswap bay of the case which never worked. These things are screwed in so tight I've tried every tool I have. Corsair shipped me some new ones but I'll have to go get some Easy Outs to replace them... "grunts".

6TB of storage sounds really sweet!

Thanks so much for your guidance. [H]4life.
 
@OP

Are you SURE your motherboard has only one PCIe slot? According to what can see, it certainly has more than one. In fact, I count 5, with the top one being x1. What do you have in the other PCIe slots, apart from the graphics card?

Edit:

Have you considered snagging a Dell PERC 5/i or PERC 6/i off eBay? You can get one for around $100-$150 dollars, many come with the BBU as well.
 
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I only have one PCie (the small one) slot... I have one PCI slot, the others are all PCIe but aren`t they for graphic cards?

From EVGA's website:
PCIE Slot 4 x PCIe x8/x16, 1 x PCIe x1, 1 x PCI
Click to expand...

Can you use raid cards in PCIe x8/x16 slots? This is my current rig:
Untitled-1.jpg
 
It's a PCIe device, why wouldn't it work? The only slot that was exclusive to video cards was AGP.
 
Looking at the card's PCIe connector lenght, those red PCIe lanes are just too long... I didn't think it would work.

Why do they make short PCIe slots?
 
You just quotes 2 different PCIe slot lengths. What do you think your sound card uses? You can plug the RAID card into a longer slot without issue.
 
"A PCIe card will fit into a slot of its physical size or larger, but may not fit into a smaller PCIe slot." Source
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Un-fucking-believable. I never knew... this is really embarrassing. I always thought the x8 or x16 specifications referenced the speed, I never knew it was the actual length of the slot. Nor did I know a device could share into a longer slots. I always thought lenght involved generations or different specs.

My sound card is PCIe x1.

Why then, if PCI-E lane size is not standard across all hardware, is there not a specific size being mentioned here? And why bother to make short ones?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118106
 
TigerLord said:
Un-fucking-believable. I never knew... this is really embarrassing. I always thought the x8 or x16 specifications referenced the speed, I never knew it was the actual length of the slot. Nor did I know a device could share into a longer slots. I always thought lenght involved generations or different specs.

My sound card is PCIe x1.

Why then, if PCI-E lane size is not standard across all hardware, is there not a specific size being mentioned here? And why bother to make short ones?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118106
Click to expand...

/facepalm

On another note, I have the 9260-4i with (4) Hitachi 3 TB 7k drives in RAID 5. Not bad speed for a 8 TB Array.:

fs1-50.jpg


fs1-4k.jpg


fs1-hd-lsi.jpg


I am thinking about ditching one of the 3TB and throwing in an SSD for the LSI CacheCade functionality.
 
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I'm still curious... if shorter cards fit in longer lanes, why bother to make PCie x1 or x16 or x8 slots? Why not make them all x32?
 
You can't have more than 16 lanes per slot. As for why not all of them are 16 lanes, that is a limitation of all the current chipsets (the higher end X58 chipset only has 36 lanes for example). Some boards are available with all PCIe x16 slots though (they don't all have 16 lanes however).
 
One has to distinguish between the physical and electrical "length" of the slots. Most longer cards will also work on electrically shorter slots, even if not at their full bus speed. Chipsets do not implement enough lanes to feed more than 2-3 full slots. Full physical slots consume too much space on the mainboard which is effectively wasted if they do not also are fully populated electrically.
 
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