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Anyone try this RAID card off ebay?

P

Priddle

n00b
Joined
Jun 15, 2010
Messages
57
This would be an ideal card for me as far as I can tell. I assume its true hardware RAID. 5 internal ports and PCIe x1. Those are the only slots I have available.

PCIe RAID card on Ebay
 
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Unbranded... best case is it is a Silicon Image controller. Worst case... who knows.

Personally, a first step in looking for a quality RAID 5 controller would be to look for onboard cache and the ability to have a battery backup unit. All of the major vendors that have reliable RAID 5 will have that.
 
I do not see a BBU on that. I assume this is either a software/fakeraid or possibly one of those all in 1 port multiplier / raid chips + a sil sata controller.
 
I don't remember the manuf, but last five-port RAID card I saw had one slight disadvantage: port five was only of any use if running RAID-5 (or some other parity RAID).

The fifth port was useless for RAID-0 or JBOD.
 
pjkenned said:
Unbranded... best case is it is a Silicon Image controller. Worst case... who knows.

Personally, a first step in looking for a quality RAID 5 controller would be to look for onboard cache and the ability to have a battery backup unit. All of the major vendors that have reliable RAID 5 will have that.
Click to expand...

That is not true! BBU is always an option! you can set the write-though or cache in raid manager

**
 
FireWire2 said:
That is not true! BBU is always an option! you can set the write-though or cache in raid manager
Click to expand...
What good is a BBU going to do when there is no cache to protect? It isn't an option as it isn't going to serve any purpose whatsoever with that controller.
 
I do not see this being a true hardware raid. Although even if it was I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole. Who wants to risk their data on a unbranded raid controller that has software of unknown quality? But then I guess you always need a backup anyways since raid is not a backup.

BTW, its actually cheaper at the ixbay site

http://www.ixbay.com/en/pci-e-sata-x-5-and-esata-x1-sata-ii-raid-card-6-ports.html

And again no where on their listing does it say hardware raid.
 
Last edited:
FireWire2 said:
That is not true! BBU is always an option! you can set the write-though or cache in raid manager

**
Click to expand...

What BBU would you connect to that? Of course a raid card BBU is not the same as a UPS battery back up sitting outside the chassis. With no onboard cache on that card, a BBU would, of course, serve no purpose. Then again, I guess people put "spinners" on their 7 series BMW's so maybe have a cheap raid card with a BBU for the purpose of "bling".
 
The point is without the cache on the card it is not a true hardware raid. And the listing makes no mention of that anyways.
 
Thanks for the replies.

Given it is no-name, I've crossed that one off the list.

I'm debating a Lian Li card. Again, it may not be true hardware raid, but the occasional review I found for it online was positive. Lian Li is a good brand name which is no news here.

http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/produc...=345&cl_index=14&sc_index=47&ss_index=123&g=f

Here's a writeup on it.
http://www.semiaccurate.com/2009/12/31/lian-li-vs-photofast-pcie-x1-raid-controllers/

I tried looking for the Photofast Evo2 controller card online but its nowhere to be found.

For me to go HW raid, I'd have to get a Dell PERC card and cut my PCIe x1 slot to make it fit. I don't mind performing surgery on my snowmobile, truck, etc but surgery on motherboards makes me nervous!
 
I sent the seller these questions a week+ ago and got a response

1) Is this software RAID or hardware RAID?

2) If I create a 4-drive RAID5 array, can I had extra drives later without rebuilding the array?

3) Does this support Western Digital Cavair Green hard drives? specifically model WD20EARS

Thank-you
Click to expand...

Sorry for my delay reply. We missed this e-mail for some unexpected reason, we do apologize for the inconvenience.

1. This is a hardware RAID card.

2. You can add extra driver later without rebuilding the array. But you need to check the power inefficient, make sure all the hard drive is powered well.

3. It can support hard drive up to 2TB, it can support model WD20EARS.

Any question please feel free to contact us.

Regards,

Helen
Click to expand...

Seems too good to be true
 
How much cache memory does the raid card have would be my next question?

Any true hardware raid 5/6 card will require cache otherwise writes will be very very slow.
 
I just noticed:

support RAID 0/ 1/ 3/ 5/ 10/ JBOD/ CLONE
Click to expand...

What is CLONE? Raid 1 and 10 is already listed.

Is clone the multiple raid-1 config? Where the disk is mirrored to multiple other drives?

If you were that paranoid about your data, wouldn't you buy a real raid card?
 
Regardless of what the card may/may not be capable of/ have. Thats not that good of a price for what you get.

A dell Perc5/i 8 port SAS with upgradeable memory and BBU can be had for the same price.
There is absolutely no reason to fuck with this piece of shit.
 
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