IDE RAID Controller

B

Brad4321

Gawd
Joined
Feb 1, 2003
Messages
553
Now that I have 5 250GB IDE hard drives (3 in use, 2 for backup), I figured that it would be more effecient to put these into raid and lose a single drive for backup than to lose two. I was just going to make my raid out of my 250 sata disks, but with all of these ide's laying around, I might as well use them too.

Raid 50 or 05 looks the most interesting. I haven't really found an ide controller that supports them though. If I can't find one reasonable, just a plain raid 5 will work.

Basically I am looking for a controller that supports at least 6 drives, although 8 would be better, and a hardware controller with all of the parity done on the card itself, and PCI-X.

These requirements haven't led me to any good quality card as of yet. As long as IDE has been around, I figure there is at least one of them out there.

I am wanting to stick around $120, but I am willing to go used as I realize I probably won't get a good card at that price new.
 
IDE RAID offers little to no performance benefit... unless you are going to invest in a fast SCSI controller and a bunch of drives with a storage shelf you are really just spinning your wheels and/or wasting money. Look elsewhere for better disk subsystem performance... IDE/SATA RAID is for hobbyists with too much money.
 
Areca and 3ware are good brands if you can afford them. You're not likely to find a card that does everything you said for anywhere near $120. Highpoint is a good compromise but it will still load your CPU a bit. Their RocketRaid 464 will run you about $150 and does RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, and JBOD on up to 8 drives.
 
Redundancy is what I am really after. I was originally planning a scsi farm, but 10K rpm drives would cost way too much for the kind of space I am using, and it wasn't worth it to get a good card and drives just for my programs and OS. I will still get my raid array of sata 250's, but once again, my goal is redundancy, not anything super fast.

The 7506-8 3ware controller I have already looked reviews up on and it performs worse than the Highpoint, which shouldn't happen. The problem with the rocketraid is that it isn't pci-x.

I did hear something along a new version of that 3ware controller to fix the pathetic performance, among other things. I will go look up reviews and see if that has happened.
 
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