Looking for RAID help

[Suprnova04]

I'm looking for an inexpensive SATA II raid controller for my home PC. I don't know much about RAID, but I know i'm sick of losing my files when a hard drive inevitably crashes. So.. I'd love any information that anyone has, or prices or whatever! Thanks so much!

-Dan-

 

[ashmedai]

Got access to Intel onboard RAID? If not, Highpoint tends to be the cheap ones.

You need to specify what RAID level and the number of drives you plan to use. Protection against a single drive failure would indicate RAID 1 (requires at least two drives, they mirror each other so a failure gives you a single drive with your data, you get the usable capacity of half your drives, writes are roughly as normal while reads can be faster in limited cases) or RAID 5 (higher computational overhead, requires at least three drives, stored via striping with parity so reads are a little faster while writes are slower compared to a single drive, you get the capacity of N drives - 1).

 

[ScHpAnKy]

If you're looking for a really nice RAID5 card for cheap check out my thread in For Sale/Trade:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1250833

Otherwise, newegg has a really good selection of RAID controllers in stock - all you have to do is:

1.) Make sure the damn thing has onboard memory
This will prevent you from spending lots of money on a cheapo software-raid card which will rob you of performance, as well as make drive failure recovery a pain in the ass

2.) Lookup reviews and check out how much of a performance hit/increase it's going to give you over a straight (Raid-less) IDE/SATA configuration...

Personally, I've had really good luck with Adaptec's budget cards such as the 2410SA - I'm actually using a few of them in an enterprise-class VM server right now, and I've already had a few drives from that system go bad just so I could see how easy they would be to recover later on - CAKE!

As it states in my FS/FT thread, I bought the 2420SA in bulk for a few different servers, the one I'm selling isn't used but the couple others I bought have been working great!

Any other questions just post in this thread - I'll be taking a look at it from time to time

 

[Suprnova04]

I'm definitely looking to just mirror two drives, so raid 1. Lots of good information and things to look for from your posts.. thanks a lot guys!

-Dan-