Dell Perc 6/i -- Still a good option for budget RAID 5/6 home server?

investinwaffles

Limp Gawd
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Apr 26, 2010
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Hi Guys, I have a quick question for those that know alot more than I...

I have always wanted to migrate to a raid 5 or raid 6 setup for my home server. I really just want something stable that will do Raid 5 with 6x2TB HDDs (Or 4 depending on my budget).

Anyways, I favor reliability over performance as I dont do anything very taxing with the server (pretty much just runs Plex and uTorrent). So as such, I want to keep the budget low so I can put as much money into hard-drives as possible.

There are TONS of Dell Perc 6/i cards on ebay for around $45 or so, and they will do exactly what I want. Are they still an OK option?

http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-PERC-6...US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item1e888090cd


All my drives are SATA III, but I dont really foresee that as being a problem. I currently have 2 WD Red drives and a 2 TB Samsung drive, which I may or may not use in the final config (depending on stability. I plan to buy 2 more WD Red drives though (for a total of 4x2TB drives at minimum). I may do some experimenting with Raid 6 as well, but I need a controller first so I can start tinkering :D


What do you all suggest?? I am kind of lost when it comes to this stuff :(
 
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2TB is the max capacity that the Perc 6i supports. They are decent performers, even with RAID 6. Just make sure that you get a good battery with it, and you'll be fine.
 
2TB is the max capacity that the Perc 6i supports. They are decent performers, even with RAID 6. Just make sure that you get a good battery with it, and you'll be fine.
Hrmm... the 5i was capped at 2tb, but I thought the 6 supported more. I recall having some 3 tb drives working well on it.
 
Finding a sub $150 IBM M5014 would be a better choice.

Those used to be plentiful, but alas, they are nowhere to be found. I ended up buying an IBM M5015 for $170.

OP, if you don't plan on using > 2TB drives, there are tons of LSI branded RAID 5/6 controllers for around that price as well. I've also seen some cheap Adaptec controllers as well (Sun version of the 5805 is going for ~$70), and they support 4 TB drives.

Hrmm... the 5i was capped at 2tb, but I thought the 6 supported more. I recall having some 3 tb drives working well on it.

Anything with a LSI 1xxx chip will only do 2 TB. The first Dell branded controllers to use the LSI 2xxx series chips were the H-series (H700 being the lowest end RAID-5 capable controller).
 
2TB is the max capacity that the Perc 6i supports. They are decent performers, even with RAID 6. Just make sure that you get a good battery with it, and you'll be fine.

Thanks for the responses guys!!

I dont really plan on upgrading to larger than 2tb drives. As long as the 2tb Red drives will work with the Perc 6i, I think it should be just fine. I will be getting a brand new battery for whatever controller I end up with anyways.

I really dont need high speed, nor do I need disk support larger than 2TB. I mostly was just wondering if the Perc controllers were reliable (which I assume they are since Dell sold millions of them). Sounds like an OK solution?

I am also pretty broke, and these cards are very affordable on Ebay. Lets me put more $$ into the actual disks :D
 
Your better off getting a newer card and using 4TB disks and selling the ones you got. 3 4GB disks in raid 5 and then just add disks as you need more space. Even 3 3TB disks in RAID 5 give you as much space as 4 2TB disks in RAID 5 and 3TB disks aren't much more then 2TB ones.
 
Have you considered ZFS instead of hardware raid? It should be a bit more forgiving with a mixed fleet of drives...
 
Yeah, I think you guys are right considering the price of 3TB WD Red's vs 2TB Reds.

Maybe I need to do some more research. My budget is pretty low so maybe ZFS is a better option for me instead of hardware raid. Put more money into actual drives instead of more hardware (and I actually would need to purchase an intel dual nic card since I am out of PCIE card slots).

I have not messed with ZFS before, but I have a good amount of experience tinkering with RAID so its more familiar which is why I wanted to pursue a cheap raid setup. I also like that there are tons of perc cards on ebay and finding a replacement is easy.

EDIT:
The only issue I have with ZFS is that I need a dedicated box, which I really dont want right now. I already have too many computers as is, and I was hoping to virtualize as much as I could onto my ESXi server. Its a white box so I don't really want to deal with getting ZFS setup to work as an NFS datastore, and I am unsure of how stable that solution would be long-term. Might just end up going with Raid 5/6/10 after all...
 
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Yeah, I think you guys are right considering the price of 3TB WD Red's vs 2TB Reds.

Maybe I need to do some more research. My budget is pretty low so maybe ZFS is a better option for me instead of hardware raid. Put more money into actual drives instead of more hardware (and I actually would need to purchase an intel dual nic card since I am out of PCIE card slots).

I have not messed with ZFS before, but I have a good amount of experience tinkering with RAID so its more familiar which is why I wanted to pursue a cheap raid setup. I also like that there are tons of perc cards on ebay and finding a replacement is easy.

You can have up to 8 drives on a PERC using a basic setup of two $10 SF-8484 to 4x SATA Cables So if you do two sets of 4x2TB you will get about 12TB usable per card.

I had the PERC5i and had no complaints about the quality of it. I was able to replace a bad drive on one occasion and expand the array by adding another drive. In both instances I was able to continue using the array.

If you need to use Windows, they are fantastic cards for the price. If the capacity constraint is within your uses....12TB is still a lot of data. I've got around 900 movies ripped at good bitrates (4-14MB/s) and I'm still only at about 9TB used. So it can last you a while.

If you do get one just be aware you will need a PCI bracket for it, you will need to put some tape over 2 of the contacts on the PCI-Express contacts (if you have Intel CPU), and you will need to put a small heatsink and preferably have some airflow over the heatsink.
 
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The Dell Perc 6/i is an excellent card and very cheap, but as stated above the drawback is the 2TB disk limit.
 
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