Pata raid5 card

[DanNeely]

I'm looking for a board to raid 4 160gb ata133 drives. I'm looking at the HighPoint Rocket Raid 454 or 464. Both appear to use the same chip HPT374, so I'm wondering if there's any difference other than the layout of the PCB. Since these're the cheapest boards available, I'm also concerned about potential gotchas.

http://www.krex.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=131
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816115021

 

[morpheus6d9]

i just bought a pata raid 5 card promise sx 6000 the reason i got this card is b/c its hardware based

 

[DanNeely]

i just bought a pata raid 5 card promise sx 6000 the reason i got this card is b/c its hardware based

Thanks for mentioning eplicit HW support, I'd assumed the difference between a raid card and having windows fake it was the HW support, but it looks like neither highpoint card is a hardware solution. The sx4060 (4 port version) costs enough more that the price/mb I thought the HD rebates were going to get me over a raid10 powered via my mobo have vanished. Bleh! At least it's not enough of a price hit to make my drive purchases an actual loss.

The sx6000 has two more ports than I need, or can afford to populate at this time. Would I be able to add additional drives to it in the future without having to burn a spindles worth of data to dvd. My other concern with the bigger card is that I'm planning on a mobo/cpu upgrade at the end of the year, and would prefer to avoid any potential purchase constraints from the cards large size.

Finally, what sort of ram does it use for it's cache. I can't find it on promises website, and it appears that I'd need to buy it seperately to use the board.

 

[morpheus6d9]

Thanks for mentioning eplicit HW support, I'd assumed the difference between a raid card and having windows fake it was the HW support, but it looks like neither highpoint card is a hardware solution. The sx4060 (4 port version) costs enough more that the price/mb I thought the HD rebates were going to get me over a raid10 powered via my mobo have vanished. Bleh! At least it's not enough of a price hit to make my drive purchases an actual loss.

The sx6000 has two more ports than I need, or can afford to populate at this time. Would I be able to add additional drives to it in the future without having to burn a spindles worth of data to dvd. My other concern with the bigger card is that I'm planning on a mobo/cpu upgrade at the end of the year, and would prefer to avoid any potential purchase constraints from the cards large size.

Finally, what sort of ram does it use for it's cache. I can't find it on promises website, and it appears that I'd need to buy it seperately to use the board.

im trying to find that answer out now lol i have the card in a 4u rack mount case so room wasnt a issue just make sure u get a big enough case

the card uses regular sd ram i have 128mb in it now which is the maximum

 

[DevilDoc]

For a 3 drive solution, get a NetCell SyncRaid SR3000.

Add one more drive for a 5 disc solution and get a SyncRaid SR5000. then you'll have 640GB of redundant space.

Got mine in March, haven't had a hiccup yet. Supports PCI-X (Not PCI-Express)

Throughput is fast, and I've tested the rebuild by pulling a drive, formatting it, plugging it back in, and seeing what happens. No problems with the data, and the rebuild took up a little system resources.

Card has 128MB built in, and isn't upgradeable. I don't really see that as an issue.

Ask me more questions, I'll tell you no lies =)

 

[DanNeely]

im trying to find that answer out now lol i have the card in a 4u rack mount case so room wasnt a issue just make sure u get a big enough case

the card uses regular sd ram i have 128mb in it now which is the maximum

Old non ddr? I might have an unised stick of that laying gathering dust at my parents, I'm not sure but I think my athlon 350 used pc100m it's old enough it might only've been pc66 though.

Edit: I found the manual in my junk box, along with some stuff that should've been tossed years ago (isa cards anyone?), and it listed my chip as using a 100mhz bus, which just leaves the 64 or 128mb question open.

 

[DanNeely]

For a 3 drive solution, get a NetCell SyncRaid SR3000.

Add one more drive for a 5 disc solution and get a SyncRaid SR5000. then you'll have 640GB of redundant space.

Got mine in March, haven't had a hiccup yet. Supports PCI-X (Not PCI-Express)

Throughput is fast, and I've tested the rebuild by pulling a drive, formatting it, plugging it back in, and seeing what happens. No problems with the data, and the rebuild took up a little system resources.

Card has 128MB built in, and isn't upgradeable. I don't really see that as an issue.

Ask me more questions, I'll tell you no lies =)

It's specs, mainly the driver free feature, are temping even if it's price and that of a 5th drive would end up delaying the rest of my planned upgrades by a pay or two.

PCI-X is a problem though. I'm looking at a 2-5 month timeframe before upgrading my mobo/cpu/etc and my current system only has stock PCI slots. And a quick google is only turning up pci-x on multiprocessor boards that are far out of m budget.

 

[DevilDoc]

It's specs, mainly the driver free feature, are temping even if it's price and that of a 5th drive would end up delaying the rest of my planned upgrades by a pay or two.

PCI-X is a problem though. I'm looking at a 2-5 month timeframe before upgrading my mobo/cpu/etc and my current system only has stock PCI slots. And a quick google is only turning up pci-x on multiprocessor boards that are far out of m budget.

The card can run in either a PCI or PCI-X slot. The basic system requirements state you need an "Available 32 or 64-bit PCI or PCI-X slot"

If you run the card in a PCI slot, you get 32-bit functionality. If you run it in a PCI-X slot, you get 64-bit.

Pie.

 

[DanNeely]

The card can run in either a PCI or PCI-X slot. The basic system requirements state you need an "Available 32 or 64-bit PCI or PCI-X slot"

If you run the card in a PCI slot, you get 32-bit functionality. If you run it in a PCI-X slot, you get 64-bit.

Thanks. I was poking around on their site, and thier documentation really seems rather inconsistant. About half the time they're claiming 64mb for the cache, the other half 128. Also, is it raid3 or raid5, I don't think their site says it explicitly anywhere and the brochure description sounds more like raid3. It doesn't matter too much to me either way since the pci bus'll be bottlenecking the card at ~50% of the arrays max, and my intrest in that card has more to do with not waging war with drivers than anything else.

 

[DevilDoc]

Thanks. I was poking around on their site, and thier documentation really seems rather inconsistant. About half the time they're claiming 64mb for the cache, the other half 128. Also, is it raid3 or raid5, I don't think their site says it explicitly anywhere and the brochure description sounds more like raid3. It doesn't matter too much to me either way since the pci bus'll be bottlenecking the card at ~50% of the arrays max, and my intrest in that card has more to do with not waging war with drivers than anything else.

The card is actually a RAID 3 variant. One of the disks attached to the controller is set aside for storage of the parity bit. NetCell calls the raid flavor RaidXL, where it purportedly writes blocks of data as a 64-bit word across the array.

Regarding the size of the built-in cache: It's 128 MB on the five-channel controller, and 64 MB on the three-channel controller.

More details here: http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20031128/

Nice features of the card:
The NetRAID setup utility isn't scary at all.
Once you set the array up, there aren't any drivers to load in the OS. It's automagically detected as a mass storage device.
There is a monitoring/configuration utility to load up in the OS, but it isn't necessary to install it.

Granted, this is a not-very-well-known chip manufacturer, so I was taking a shot in the dark on the controller, but I'm glad I did.

Occasionally the monitor/config util freaks out when I boot the machine, but the array is still available and you can just kill the utility without having any troubles.