Looking To Replace eSATA HBA

A

amp88

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 3, 2007
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I've been using this eSATA RAID card (based on the Silicon Image 3124 chipset) for a while but now I want to upgrade to something a little better. This card only allows me to create a RAID5 volume with a maximum of 5 drives and it employs software RAID5. I want to be able to create RAID5 volumes with 8+ drives and would prefer a PCIe hardware RAID5 solution. I need at least 2 eSATA ports with Port Multiplying. I'll be using this card along with a Proavio editBOX 8PM. I'm looking for some suggestions from you guys outlining which options I have. I don't have a set budget but I realise it may be quite expensive. The card the manufacturers offer when buying this enclosure is the Highpoint RocketRAID 2314.

Thanks in advance for any advice.
 
Blue Fox said:
Areca 1202? I wasn't able to find one for sale last time I checked: http://areca.us/products/portmultiplier.htm
Click to expand...

This looks like an interesting card and should be a bit cheaper than the Sonnet Tempo. I can't find any for sale in the UK, though, and I'm a little bit worried by the following sentence on the page you linked to:

Areca said:
supports up to 8 SATA ll peripheral devices using port multiplier box (ARC-4020).
Click to expand...

Will this be compatible with my enclosure? Hopefully it's just a case of Areca not wanting to promote other manufacturer's hardware rather than a design that's forced to use Areca hardware for the enclosure too, but I don't know for certain. I'm also unable to find any proper reviews for this card.
 
I don't see why it wouldn't work with what you have. That other card doesn't appear to do hardware RAID by the way.
 
Blue Fox said:
That other card doesn't appear to do hardware RAID by the way.
Click to expand...

Yeah, hardware RAID would be good but it's not a requirement. The cheapest I can find the ARC-1202 is here where (including delivery) it would be approximately 300 Euros (about £275 GBP at current exchange rate). the Sonnet Tempo E4P is available here for £213.99 including free next day delivery. The E4P doesn't have hardware RAID but it does include 4 eSATA ports rather than 2 (more headroom for future expansion) and uses PCIe x4 compared to the PCIe x1 on the ARC-1202.
 
If you can live without the hardware RAID, you have many more options at your disposal. The Areca is really the only card I know of that does hardware RAID (and fits the other requirements), so if you don't go with that, the Highpoint card that was just posted would probably be a better option than the other one (I hadn't even heard of the company until you posted it).
 
I thought that the Sonnet card was higher quality than the Highpoint card, but if that's not the case then I think I'll be going for the RocketRAID 2314 (which I can get for about £175). Thanks for the help guys.
 
I got the 2314 in yesterday afternoon. I needed to update the drivers and BIOS to the latest from their website in order to use all 8 of the drives (i.e. there wasn't port multiplier support out of the box for my enclosure). Once I'd done that I created a single RAID5 volume using all of the available capacity. I didn't see a way to specify the stripe size for the volume though, and I can't see a way to actually determine what it is through the Management application. I used background initialisation for the array so I could write some data to it while it was initialising. It took roughly 16 hours to initialise the 4.77TB volume comprised of my 8 WD7500AAKS drives. I've done some initial benchmark testing with HDTach and the results are a little disappointing. I'm getting the following at the moment:



Any suggestions as to how to improve the performance?

System Specs:
AMD Athlon 4850e @ 2.75 GHz
Mobo ASUS M3A78-EM
RAM: 6GB DDR2-800
Boot Drive: 300GB WD IDE

OS: Windows XP Pro x64

edit: Added CrystalDiskMark bench:

 
I installed the WebGUI management for the card and I can now see that the block size for the array is 64k and the sector size is 512 bytes. When I was creating the partition on the drive (using Disk Management in Administrative Tools) presumably I should have matched the "Allocation Unit Size" to the sector size (512 bytes)? Anyway, just as I was looking at this information I got an email notification from the management software informing me that one of the drives looks like it's on its way out:

Management said:
Thu, 19 Mar 2009 15:10:54 GMT Standard Time:
[2310_00]: Disk 'WDC WD7500AAKS-00RBA0-WD- (Location: Device_1_3_1) is about to fail because of bad sector critical.
Click to expand...

Checking the SMART information the "Re-allocated Sector Count" is 711 and the Threshold is 200. However, from what I've read about this particular SMART value it may not actually be due to a defect on the drive. I'm running a verification on the array just now (approx 4 hours to complete), so I'll see what the results of that are. Bit of a bummer anyway.
 
Verification completed OK with no errors. Since this is just a new setup I deleted the RAID5 to create some different configurations to see what kind of speeds I could get.

RAID0, 8 drives, 160 GB total (20 GB per drive):



RAID0, 4 drives (2 on each channel), maximum capacity (2.72 TB):



RAID0, 4 drives (all on same channel), maximum capacity (2.72 TB):



RAID0, 2 drives (1 on each channel), maximum capacity (1.36 TB):



JBOD, 8 drives, maximum capacity (5.45 TB):



JBOD, 1 drive, maximum capacity (698 MB):



RAID5, 8 drives, 8 GB total (1 GB per drive):



I really would have expected to see better numbers than the above (at least for the 4 and 8 drive RAID0 configurations). It doesn't make a lot of sense...

Anyway, after playtime I'm going to pluck the supposedly faulty drive out, connect it up on its own and run the Western Digital diagnostic tool to see what it has to say.
 
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