inexpensive hardware sata raid card?

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sdadept

Limp Gawd
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Jul 3, 2004
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Trying to find an inexpensive hardware based raid card for an esxi install. I have 2 sets of raid 1 arrays. raid1 2x 75gb raptors (boot drives) and raid1 2x 1tb (vm drives). Preferably I'd like to get a raid card that can do 2 raid 1's and is hardware based but I could live with a card that just did raid 1 hardware based for a single array.

Has to be esxi compatible and preferably inexpensive.

any suggestions or recommendations on cards? i've been looking at the 3ware cards but its so hard to tell which are software and which are fully hardware based.
 
For RAID 1 and RAID 0, multiple array or not, you don't need a hardware RAID card. Even a fakeRAID card should be enough.
 
sdadept said:
any suggestions or recommendations on cards? i've been looking at the 3ware cards but its so hard to tell which are software and which are fully hardware based.
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Easiest way to tell whether or not the card does hardware RAID is if they include any RAM on the card (or a slot for it).
 
Blue Fox said:
Easiest way to tell whether or not the card does hardware RAID is if they include any RAM on the card (or a slot for it).
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3ware's 9650SE and 9690 cards don't have user-upgradable memory, yet they're still hardware RAID cards.
 
Syntax Error said:
3ware's 9650SE and 9690 cards don't have user-upgradable memory, yet they're still hardware RAID cards.
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I didn't say that it had to be removable, just that a slot for memory indicated that it is a hardware RAID card if there is no RAM present on the board.
 
The kicker here is that it needs to be ESX compatbile.

maybe some esx guy will chime in, cause im not sure what is supported and what is not.
 
I'd go with a 9500S if you can find one. It does online capacity expansion. You can just grow a storage array organically.
 
I recently was in the same situation. Wanted to roll out ESXi Server once it went free, and didn't have the budget for expensive controllers. It's a pretty narrow set of supported parts.

After digging around, the cheapest part I could find anywhere was the Adaptec ASR-2405. You cna fidn it here: http://adaptec.com/en-US/products/Controllers/Hardware/sas/entry/SAS-2405/

I honestly forget what we paid, but it was fairly reasonable compared to most other supported cards. And it works quite admirably. Currently hooked to 4 74GB Raptors.
 
You can usually find the 2405 OEM for about $200, or the retail kit for about $250. You will have to purchase your breakout cable separately for the OEM part.
 
I would avoid Adaptec 2-series RAID cards, I've heard reports from many of our storage gurus here that they just have lackluster performance for its price. If you're willing to spend more money, perhaps an Adaptec 3-series card would be more appropriate (provided you never OCE, because it takes forever). It should provide more performance; they usually have good deals on eBay.

That, or a simple Dell Perc 5/i would do you very well.
 
My understanding was that the 3 series Adaptecs were not "real" hwraid... Is that mistaken?
 
drgnfang said:
My understanding was that the 3 series Adaptecs were not "real" hwraid... Is that mistaken?
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Yea they are true HW raid cards....no upgradeable ram though.
Really good performance/features for the price i will say.
 
I would think the adaptec 2xxx would be faster than the adaptec 3xxx. I thought the 3xxx were iop341 (or iop333?) where as the 2xxx is iop348.
 
houkouonchi said:
I would think the adaptec 2xxx would be faster than the adaptec 3xxx. I thought the 3xxx were iop341 (or iop333?) where as the 2xxx is iop348.
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Theoretically, true, however the 2045 and 2405 do not do any type of parity RAID (5, 6, 50, etc). They're budget cards so the feature list is limited to help keep the price low.
 
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