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Looking for good raid controller for x-25m raid0

G

guitarfly

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 27, 2007
Messages
145
Hi,

If I were to have four x-25m 160gb gen 2 drives, would it make sense to put all 4 in raid0 for performance? What is a good raid controller around the $200-$1000 range that would not be a bottleneck to having those in raid0? Some of the things I'm interested are:

1. Ability to do other common raid modes (if I decide to change in the future).
2. Compatible with Vista, Windows 7, and possibly Ubuntu/Linux.
3. Able to control more drives if I decide to switch back to hard disks (8-12?)
4. Not be a bottleneck to fast SSD raid0 (would it need to be a PCI-E then?)
5. Related to #5, probably have a decent amount of cache (512mb or upgradeable maybe?).
6. Preferably not require battery backup (if there is a choice).
7. Work with my mobo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128066. I have one graphics card so I think my other PCI-E x16, 3 PCI Express x1 and PCI slots are free.

Any suggestions or comments are greatly appreciated. If the peformance gain won't be good or there are issue doing something like this, please let me know. As far as backup, I recently purchased a WHS box so I will backup my files regularly in case of a raid failure. I do need it to be stable enough though that the raid doesn't drop on me all the time.

Thanks!
 
LSI 9260-8i is fastest hardware raid card atm. up to 2.7GB sek read and up to 2GB write.

Not sure about drivers. Computurd in this forum got it.
 
agrophel said:
LSI 9260-8i is fastest hardware raid card atm. up to 2.7GB sek read and up to 2GB write.

Not sure about drivers. Computurd in this forum got it.
Click to expand...
Awesome, thanks. I'll try to PM Computurd to see how it is working out. I'm surprised it looks like it much less than some of the areca cards.
 
It is a 6GB/s card. so the IOP on it is far and away better than anything out there, i have been seeing some people evejn outstripping me with intels, i am currently using vertex, it is no BS that it is the fastest out there right now, may want to wait and see what the numbers on the 9210-8i are, but barring anything significantly better, you cant go wrong with this cards!
 
Computurd said:
It is a 6GB/s card. so the IOP on it is far and away better than anything out there, i have been seeing some people evejn outstripping me with intels, i am currently using vertex, it is no BS that it is the fastest out there right now, may want to wait and see what the numbers on the 9210-8i are, but barring anything significantly better, you cant go wrong with this cards!
Click to expand...
Awesome, thanks. The card arrived - I can't wait to get it installed :)
 
Finally got around to installing it... Seems to be really fast to me (never had an SSD before) but I'm getting some pretty depressing HD Tune 3.5 results. I am using the Win2k8 64bit driver, Win 7 RTM 64bit,4 drives with 1MB stripe size, write back, and I upgraded the latest firmware on the controller. HD Tune says I am getting 190.5 MB/sec maximum, 174.6 MB/sec average and 162.4 MB/sec minimum. Correct me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't I get something closer to 250 MB/sec * 4 = 1000 MB/sec? Any ideas why it is so low? Also, the cpu usage says -1.0% and the burst rate is stating 78.6 MB/sec... Attached screenshot...

hdtunebenchmarklsi.png
 
Just ran HD Tune on my raid0 array using two western digital drives and 128kb stripes. I get an average rate of 114 MB/sec and burst rate of 108.9 MB/sec. It means 4 x25-m drives are giving me around the same performance as two western digital platters??? What a depressing way to go into monday :(. Any ideas why I'm getting these results would be greatly appreciated.
 
darkvenge said:
Try setting a higher block size in HDtune, 1MB or higher. Try ATTO as well.
Click to expand...

Still getting poor results :(

hdtunebenchmarklsi2.png


Only when I go up to 8mb then I get this:

hdtunebenchmarklsi8mb.png


ATTO doesn't do any better:

atto.png


Is there something I am missing here?? The one decent benchmark I have seen (at least I think it is decent) is this one:

crystaldiskmark22.png


And even that one isn't very good...

I have the card currently in my second PCI-E 2.0 x16 slot. Is that where I should have it? What could be going wrong?
 
If I were you, I'd setup a software RAID0 on my MB just to make sure the drives were OK.
 
The reason that you are not getting good benchies with that card is becaue those benches are borked. The only three good benchmarks with hardware raid is the I/O meter, and everest, and crystal diskmark
Upgrade your firmware on the card. if you are running vista use the windows 2008 driver, it is for servers but works much better. download everest and run a linear read test, 1 mb, and we will see where you are then....
 
I wish I could help more, I just don't have enough experience with these SSD's yet to steer you in the right direction. I would try searching google for others with similar setup (SSD's or not), and see if there is a setting somewhere you might be missing. I was also going to suggest setting up a RAID0 array on MoBo.

What other block sizes for RAID does your RAID controller support? Which ones have you tried?
 
i have the same controller, i can definitely help

RAID 0
1 MB stripe, or 512, but 1 mb better
adaptive read ahead
always write back
direct i/o
and disk cache policy enabled

also turn off sata ncq in bios of card....you will be moving along in no time, trust me
i am getting 1.7 gb/s read with this card

also make sure that you are checking the drive properties within your os and setting to optimal settings
 
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