Looking for a RAID 1 card

Uncle Toxie

Uncle Toxie

Gawd
Joined
Aug 22, 2004
Messages
513
I'm not even sure there is such a beast but...

After a small "Oh my GOD the hard drive crashed!" moment on Friday, my boss wants to put a mirror in one of our servers. We have Server 2000 (may become 2003 in a few months) and the onboard SATA does not support RAID.

I did a quick search over at Newegg and can't make a decision on my own. We only have PCI slots in the server so I am limited there. Is there a true hardware raid addon card for a PCI slot that supports SATA II or even SATA 150? On another note, will a true hardware RAID card make a difference? I'm throwing these terms around like I know what they mean, I read a few reviews for cards on Newegg and a lot of them mentioned that the card was not a true hardware raid and it drug down the system. I really don't want that to happen either.

If anyone could suggest a decent card here I would be forever in your debt!

Sorry about the rambling, allergie meds make me goofy, I hope this makes sense!
 
RAID-1 should be easy to implement in software without much/ any performance penalty.

A low-end controller/ software implementation will lack some/ all possible performance improvement features.

If you are trying to improve the system uptime by mirroring the OS partition, I think that software RAID-1 will be adequate in most instances. Whether you use windows dynamic disks or some cheap-o RAID1 card should not matter much.

If you are looking to improve uptime and performance for a database or other application by mirroring its working/ data/ <whatever> drive, then I would look for a hardware solution with on-board cache.

please excuse all the handwaving points, I have little firsthand experience with software RAID-1, much less with hardware RAID-1.
 
Sounds just right then. We only want it for uptime. The office with the server is, at minimum, a two hour drive away and restoring from the backups would take a prohibitive amount of time over the VPN link.

This is something that my boss and I have been begging to have done but the man that pays the bills wouldn't cough up a couple hundred bucks. For some reason, no one wants to do anything to prevent a disaster, just sort of clean one up and point fingers. He made several crucial errors in giving my boss a company credit card and going out of town for a week. We plan on taking advantage of that. :D

I have been looking at this one.
 
I do not know what features you need (SMTP alerts etc), but if you wanted to ``go cheap'' you can definitely beat that price.

Here's an article about win2k dynamic disks and boot volumes.
 
Thanks again, and that article was great, that has given me some ideas of things to try out.
 
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