Looking for a 8 port RAID-6 card

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rUmX

Gawd
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The ones you listed are older generation cards. Slower. No support for SATA-III/SAS-600. Your basically buying at a full generation behind with those. If your goal is "long term reliability" then buying older generation equipment probably isn't the right answer.

As long as you are looking in the mid-$400s you can look at more modern SAS/SATA cards. Look at these:

LSI Megaraid 9260-8i
Areca 1880i

You'll find the LSI card in the mid-$400 range. The Areca card will be more expensive - mid $500s probably - but is generally agreed to have a much better user interface and offers a better "experience". Both are built on essentially the same ROC chip, so performance should be comparable.
 
Does the raid have to be implemented in hardware or is firmware/driver based raid acceptable?
What OS will you be running?
 
LSI Megaraid 9260-8i would be my choice. I've very happy with my LSI Megaraid 9260-4i. Just make sure you check for the latest firmware; though it is an in-place update, so you don't loose an existing array.
 
plugwash said:
Does the raid have to be implemented in hardware or is firmware/driver based raid acceptable?
What OS will you be running?
Click to expand...

I used to use mobo based Intel and NV raid-5 in the past. Performance was decent for both, with the NV having terrible write speeds. But I did not have a great experience with either on RAID-5 so that's why I'm going with Raid-6 this time around. I also need > 6 ports. I really want 12 ports but that's out of my price range. Will be using Win7. The server will be used for many other duties, not just file serving.

PigLover said:
The ones you listed are older generation cards. Slower. No support for SATA-III/SAS-600. Your basically buying at a full generation behind with those. If your goal is "long term reliability" then buying older generation equipment probably isn't the right answer.

As long as you are looking in the mid-$400s you can look at more modern SAS/SATA cards. Look at these:

LSI Megaraid 9260-8i
Areca 1880i

You'll find the LSI card in the mid-$400 range. The Areca card will be more expensive - mid $500s probably - but is generally agreed to have a much better user interface and offers a better "experience". Both are built on essentially the same ROC chip, so performance should be comparable.
Click to expand...

Blackdragon said:
LSI Megaraid 9260-8i would be my choice. I've very happy with my LSI Megaraid 9260-4i. Just make sure you check for the latest firmware; though it is an in-place update, so you don't loose an existing array.
Click to expand...

Thanks. I'll check these out =)
 
Good idea to check the forums for your motherboard manufacturer to check compatability. I know LSI and EVGA don't always play well together. But Areca is fine.

Also, I wouldn't get too hung up on the SATAIII(600) hype. You can set up RAID6 with 6 or 8 mechanical green drives that will be reading/writing at 500MB+/sec. With burst of 800+ on a "old" SATAII(300) raid controller. Now if your going to use SSD, then, yes, the SATAIII(600) interface is necessary, but not for mechanical drives.

But more important than interface speed is the processor speed of the controller. If I were shopping for a new card, I would look for an Areca 1231ML, preferably gently used, at a good price, with a BBU and 2GB of cache.

Nothing wrong with buying older tech, you save a lot of $$$, all the bugs have been worked out, and if you turn of the desire to buy more than you really need, then you'll likely find it does the job just fine, for a fraction of the cost.

The Areca 1880i is very fussy about drives, so if you do go that route, make sure you pick a drive it likes.
 
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Have you considering purchasing a simple HBA card and virtualizing your server? That way you can keep running Windows for your tasks and Solaris/FreeBSD for storage. The reason is obviously ZFS, which can be a hell lot faster than any RAID card, and is absolutely the most reliable way to store data on hard-disk drives in the industry.
 
Have you looked into a PERC 6/I ? Can be had off ebay for ~$100 and is essentially a $700 LSI Raid Card.
 
iconK...do you have to have a link to proof to backup your statment that SW raid is faster than any HW raid? I would really like to see this.
 
If you go to the 2 SAS ports card route, you can add an SAS expander later to go beyond 8 drives.
 
iconiK said:
Pick your poison: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=zfs+vs+hardware+raid+performance

Keep in mind ZFS allows you to use system memory as cache (LARC), as well as other drives as cache (L2ARC) - useful being 15K HDDs and SSDs. Such a setup will absolutely smoke any RAID card in any kind of measurement.
Click to expand...

So..what happens to the files that aren't cached? Same performance? How many more drives and RAM do you need to cover a larger set of possible transfer types? I've seen those very links and they are all suspect since it they are orientated towards already wanting ZFS to be better and will make the tests show as such.
 
Trepidati0n said:
So..what happens to the files that aren't cached? Same performance?.
Click to expand...

It caches blocks, not files. Non-cached files are read off the main disks instead of memory or cache SSDs/HDDs, so yeah, it'll be slower, but still very close to a hardware RAID6.

Trepidati0n said:
How many more drives and RAM do you need to cover a larger set of possible transfer types? I've seen those very links and they are all suspect since it they are orientated towards already wanting ZFS to be better and will make the tests show as such.
Click to expand...

Not really; ZFS does have lower write speed due to the need to calculate checksums up to the root of the filesystem for every changed block, but it's far better than you would expect because it does not have the RAID 5/6 write hole. 4K will take the largest hit, but if you run heavy databases you probably have the budget to throw in a cache SSD or two for ZIL which will absolutely smoke hardware RAID controllers.

Initially ZFS can be slightly slower than hardware RAID without enough memory, but can be upgrade to much better performance to the point where it is a night and day difference. Also, reliability is unparalleled.
 
While I don't disagree that ZFS is generally more reliable than HW raid, I must take issue with the performance claim... All things being the same - lets say an 8 drive HW RAID 6 vs an 8 drive ZFS RAID-z2, without any sort of special configuration like a solid state cache drive on the zfs and both using the same drives - the zfs setup simply won't provide the same level of performance. It will be close, but the HW RAID will be faster.

I have an 8 drive RAID 6 on an Areca ARC-1880i and I have seen raid-z2 benchmarks with the same drives, the HW raid is faster...
 
How much faster are we talking about? I can't speak for anyone else here, but I wouldn't pick ZFS over hardware raid because of performance (unless the zfs was grossly slower), but for the feature set.
 
Youtube switched from hardware raid to software raid and got 20-30% more performance:
http://blog.zorinaq.com/?e=10

The only reason of using ZFS, is not performance - it is safety. No other solution protects against bit rot.

If you need high performance, add SSDs as cache.
 
@OP

As another has stated, a PERC 6/i is ideal. In terms of value for money, it scores 10/10 - nothing comes even remotely close. Again, don't get hung up on the SATA III interface; unless you plan on buying 8 SSDs, you won't gain any benefit.

One thing to note with the PERC cards is that the /i models are internal models and do not fully support SAS expanders; you'll only see a maximum of 8 drives, whether they are connected to an expander or not. If you want expander support, get a PERC 6/e.
 
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