Best RAID-5 Controller Card

H

havokator

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 12, 2003
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What is the best pci-e card for raid5 that I can get? I am looking for a card that can support at least 4 drives for hopefully less than $150.
 
Are you looking for used? Because at that price you will not get a true hardware raid card. These generally cost 2 to 3 times your limit. And then you need a battery backup unit to enable write cache otherwise the write performance will suffer.

You can get fakeraid (bios raid with software driver) cards in this price range. However I do not believe any of them are better than the Intel fakeraid that is on your motherboard.

One example of a fakeraid card is here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115029
 
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I think the title should be changed to "Best RAID-5 Controller card for under $150" in which case the answer is that you won't get a decent hardware raid card for that price, as drescherjm said :)
 
Dell's PERC 5i can be had for under 150$, including the battery.

Dell's PERC 6i (which also supports raid6) can be had for right around 150$, though you'd likely have to pick up the cache and battery as well.
 
I picked up the Perc 6i on eBay for just shy of $150. There's a huge thread about the 5i/6i on overclock.net and it's well received. It came with a battery backup and a cable for 4 harddrives.

I haven't installed it yet, but it sounds like an excellent true HW raid card for the price.
 
You can get a PERC 5/i with battery and 256MB cache on Ebay for ~$100 if you do a BIN. I just grabbed an auction one for $89.99 shipped which included battery and 256MB cache.. and the backplane cable which will not be used.

You can also upgrade to 512MB cache for about $8 shipped from Ebay. Any x8 or x16 ECC 512MB DDR2 stick should work just fine.(edit: may have to be Registered.. still trying to confirm).

You can grab a cable that supports up to 4 SATA drives for $6 + shipping from here: (A SAS cable has both the data and power in one plug)
http://www.cross-mark.com/50cm-serial-attached-scsisas-sff8484-sata-cable-p-842.html
 
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That's where I picked up my cable. Took a while to arrive since it ships from Hong Kong, but looks to be correct.
 
Khadgar said:
That's where I picked up my cable. Took a while to arrive since it ships from Hong Kong, but looks to be correct.
Click to expand...

How long did it take to arrive? In the past when i have ordered stuff from Hong Kong, it has usually taken 7-14 business days.
 
Ah yes, I had forgotten about the PERC cards, those would do just fine.
 
I guess I could have mentioned that in my post as well. This was one of the reasons why I asked about "used" because you generally do not get a brand new PERC for these prices but used you can always find deals.
 
So it sounds like the Dell PERC 5i is the card to get for true hardware RAID5?

Also, is the only benefit in using a real hardware raid card over a fakeraid card that it decreases the load on the processor? Is there any other benefit to using a real hardware raid card such as the PERC 5i ?
 
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Also, is the only benefit in using a real hardware raid card over a fakeraid card that it decreases the load on the processor?
Click to expand...

The most important benefit is performance since modern CPUs can handle parity calculations without any problems. I mean I typically see 7% CPU usage or less on a single core of a 3 year old core2quad while reading or writing under linux software raid even on software raid 6 arrays that read at 700 MB/s and write at 500MB/s. That was measured on a 9 disk raid 6 with 9 hitachi 2TB drives (previous generation). However I admit there are some bad drivers under windows that have really high CPU usage for some unknown reason. And when I say performance some of these fakeraid controllers max out at 20 MB/s writes which in my opinion is pathetic. The main issue is cache. I am assuming that they do not use a cache resulting in every write operation that is less than the size of a stripe to cause the need to read the entire stripe, calculate parity then write it back.
 
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