Best 4 port SAS controller

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Enlefo

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 1, 2007
Messages
273
I am looking for a 4x internal port SAS controller to use in a video editing machine I am setting up. If possible I want to get a x4 PCI-E card since that is what the machine currently has free, it also has a 133mhz PCI-X slot.
I realize almost every card is gonna be x8 PCI-E but if I can find a good x4 that would be ideal.
If anyone has some good recommendation or a card as well as a vendor, the egg doesn't have a very large selection of SAS cards.
 
I should have mentioned, I wanted something with internal cache. The more the better. BBWC would be great too.
 
I just have a question:

Do any of the cards you guys suggested exist in PCI or PCI-X versions? I'm looking for a similar thing but the system only has a single PCI slot (in which a PCI-X card should work also, I've read), but no PCIe.
 
djBon2112 said:
I just have a question:

Do any of the cards you guys suggested exist in PCI or PCI-X versions? I'm looking for a similar thing but the system only has a single PCI slot (in which a PCI-X card should work also, I've read), but no PCIe.
Click to expand...

PCI-X is not the same as PCI. A normal PCI SAS card will be limited due to the PCI bus bandwidth.
 
Enlefo said:
PCI-X is not the same as PCI. A normal PCI SAS card will be limited due to the PCI bus bandwidth.
Click to expand...

I'm aware of that. But the PCI-X standard is backwards compatible with PCI, so the card will work, just at the reduced bandwidth. That said, I will be running 4x 750 GB WD SATA drives with the controller; will the PCI bus' reduced bandwidth really hurt me a lot there, or should it be sufficient?
 
Enlefo said:
That was one of the cards I was checking out the other day. How have your experiences with it been?
Click to expand...

well, it worked.. thats about all I can give at the moment.. I just dropped it in the machine with one drive so I could see if it functioned. I'm dismantling the machine and rebuilding it before I setup my 8x500gb array. I haven't actually used it for anything other than to play around with vmware esx server for a few hours with the one drive attached
 
Just a bit of a bump since I now have another question. I changed my route and am now going PCIe for the controller, and I also found a case with much more expandability.

I'm wondering if anyone can recommend some good 8-port (internal) SAS controllers? I need a couple recommendations since I'm trying to price shop these things on eBay for good deals :p

Also, to save making a new thread:

If I were to half 8 hard drives (750GB), which combination do you think would give me the best balance of performance, space and safety: 8-disk RAID5, 7-disk RAID5 w/hot spare and auto-reconstruct, or 8-disk RAID6 (assuming the controller can do it)?
 
I'll save making another thread too. Is there any issues with the LSI 8344ELP? One of the only reviews I read said it runs quite hot. There isn't really any good places that review RAID controllers or anything :/ Anyways I was just wondering if that card would work well on my eVGA 680i under RAID 5 with 4xSeagate 750GB or if I should look at some other options. Thanks.
 
djBon2112 said:
I'm wondering if anyone can recommend some good 8-port (internal) SAS controllers? I need a couple recommendations since I'm trying to price shop these things on eBay for good deals :p
Click to expand...
The LSI 8888ELP is a good one. Hardware raid 6, and they occasionally go for $200ish on eBay.
djBon2112 said:
If I were to half 8 hard drives (750GB), which combination do you think would give me the best balance of performance, space and safety: 8-disk RAID5, 7-disk RAID5 w/hot spare and auto-reconstruct, or 8-disk RAID6 (assuming the controller can do it)?
Click to expand...
Raid 6 will be better in terms of safety, but (depending on your workload) either a tiny bit slower than raid 5 or a whole lot slower.
 
unhappy_mage said:
The LSI 8888ELP is a good one. Hardware raid 6, and they occasionally go for $200ish on eBay.

Raid 6 will be better in terms of safety, but (depending on your workload) either a tiny bit slower than raid 5 or a whole lot slower.
Click to expand...

It will be a fileserver/download server running Ubuntu Server 7.10 (maybe 8.04, depends, though I'm willing to go to another server distro if I need to [reading the reviews of the 8888ELP; says no Debian/Ubuntu support :(), serving HD content, music, and general files with SAMBA/FTP over Gigabit Ethernet. Filesystems will be either XFS (for the HD content) or EXT3 or EXT4 (for the rest). Does that affect it? :p
 
I'm surprised to hear there's no Linux support. The MegaRAID line has historically been supported just fine, directly in the kernel. That would mean that there's no difference in support between Debian and Redhat.
 
unhappy_mage said:
I'm surprised to hear there's no Linux support. The MegaRAID line has historically been supported just fine, directly in the kernel. That would mean that there's no difference in support between Debian and Redhat.
Click to expand...

The guy in the review was talking about the management utilities in such, which apparently only support Red Hat and SuSE, though I'm not sure how much that really matters once the array is set up. And the OS won't be on the array (it'll be on a USB stick :p) so I don't need the array to work for the OS to work (ignoring the data on it :p).
 
It is packaged in RPM format, but it's just Java stuff inside, as far as I can tell. You'll need lebxerces26, which isn't in Debian sid (only 27 is), but that should be doable. Do "apt-get install rpm" and you can just unpack it:
Code: 
sudo -s
cd /
rpm2cpio ~me/MegaRAID_Storage_Manager-2.35-01.noarch.rpm | cpio -idmv
Then you can start it:
Code: 
cd /usr/local/MegaRAID\ Storage\ Manager
./startupui.sh
Unfortunately, they've shipped their own JRE with this, which makes it a good deal larger to download. I'm not terribly impressed with their packaging, but at least they're trying.
 
unhappy_mage said:
The LSI 8888ELP is a good one. Hardware raid 6, and they occasionally go for $200ish on eBay.
Click to expand...

Been doing some more browsing: any others? I don't want to be stuck just to LSI here ;) Anything that'll do RAID5 on hardware with some sort of good write cache, and preferably 8 internal SATA/SAS drive ports (though I'll do 4 if needed; I have no use for external ports). I'm about a month away from actually going in and buying one, but I'm trying to get as many options as possible so that when I do go to buy, I'm not stuck because no one is selling particular card A :p
 
I went with the LSI 8344ELP with 4x Fujitsu 3147rc 147gb 15k RPM drives. Puttin em all in RAID0 for a hash drive in an HD video editing machine. I'll run some benches when it's ready.
 
Enlefo said:
I went with the LSI 8344ELP with 4x Fujitsu 3147rc 147gb 15k RPM drives. Puttin em all in RAID0 for a hash drive in an HD video editing machine. I'll run some benches when it's ready.
Click to expand...

Sounds sick man! I'd love to see benches of that!
 
I forgot to take screen shots before I put this into play but it got 240MB/s sustained transfer, 375 burst. I was hoping for more but the video guys love it. They can do multiple 720p raw video streams off the array so w00t.
 
I'm a big fan of Adaptec. The 3405 would be a great card worth mentioning here.
 
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