PCI RAID Card

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athlon1.2

Supreme [H]ardness
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I pulled out an old Adaptec 2410SA RAID controller and for whatever reason it won't properly work with 2x 1.5TB drives I had planned to do RAID-1 with.

Can someone recommend a real SATA RAID card I can get for cheap?
 
Max. physical disk drive size: 1TB
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from this page: http://www.adaptec.com/en-us/support/raid/sata/aar-2410sa/

Yeah, it doesn't support disks over 1TB and arrays totaling over 2TB.

What OS are you using? If it is OS X, then you can use that card to do software RAID through the OS (it works great in the setup).

If you use Windows, then you can do FakeRAID.

However, if you are looking for a real hardware RAID card, you're not going to get a good one under $400, though I'm not sure why you would need it for RAID 1. ;)
 
It's for Linux, but I don't see the individual drives show up. The card detects the drives, but when I attempt to initialize them or create an array, it shows no drives.
 
I can't create an array or initialize drives on using the RAID BIOS, it shows the disks but when I go to create an array it shows no disks.

In Linux I don't see the drives show up at /dev/disk/by-id/

And what I had gotten for another build was an HP E200 card for under $100 on eBay... I noticed the card is just a PCI-X card with a PCIE bridge, was wondering what I could find in PCI or PCI-X....
 
Create the array within linux. Sudo apt-get install mdadm

This will install the necessary RAID partitioning and creation tools.

Also, in your device BIOS, delete any RAID containers you've already made, this will allow the drives to appear as single, individual drives for Linux to recognize.
 
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I can't create RAID arrays or initialize the drives with the Adaptec controller, the only thing it does is list the drives in the diagnostics/status menu. Nothing more. I can't use mdadm to create a RAID array on a disk the OS just doesn't see. Either the Adaptec doesn't support showing the disks to the OS like that or it has issues with the 1TB limit.

Anyways I borrowed a 3Ware 8500-8 card and it seems to work with 1.5TB drives. It seems I can find that card for under $100.. which sort of answers my original question.
 
But that is a software raid card right? I would look for a nice used hardware raid card ( own cpu and memory )
Because it won't make much difference performance wise, you can just use windows for raid or your motherboard.

But i can be mistaken of course.
 
It's software, yes. Hardware RAID isn't really important for casual servers. I'm sure that Athlon can decide for himself based on his own needs.
 
Shaggy8675 said:
But that is a software raid card right? I would look for a nice used hardware raid card ( own cpu and memory )
Because it won't make much difference performance wise, you can just use windows for raid or your motherboard.

But i can be mistaken of course.
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A good hardware RAID card can cost upwards of $600. That's not really a price tag many people want to pay for, and on top of it, HDDs with TLER must be used if the card has bad drive spin up/down management.
 
Since you are using Linux, why not get the Highpoint card. Just have the card detect the drives, then setup software RAID through Linux. Unless you need hardware RAID, using a RAID controller with software RAID works very well. Though I have to agree, FakeRAID on Highpoint cards is horrendous and I would only use them with software RAID, like the system in my sig. ;)
 
athlon1.2 said:
This is for an original HP ML110, and furthermore I'd much rather thermite all my hard drives and shoot myself before I use a Highpoint fakeRAID product.
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Sounds like you've got issues.
 
mikeblas said:
Sounds like you've got issues.
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No, using Highpoint in FakeRAID is beyond aweful. I use mine with software RAID, so the controller only needs to see the drives. Very few FakeRAID controllers are worth their salt and Highpoint has never worked well with me and many others. Give them a try sometime, you'll see what we're talking about. ;)
 
Red Falcon said:
No, using Highpoint in FakeRAID is beyond aweful. I use mine with software RAID, so the controller only needs to see the drives. Very few FakeRAID controllers are worth their salt and Highpoint has never worked well with me and many others. Give them a try sometime, you'll see what we're talking about. ;)
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I've used Highpoint cards in a few of my workstations over the years and haven't had trouble. I don't use them in servers, since the servers I build demand hardware RAID for performance, and management interfaces for monitoring. For systems that don't see a lot of load, software RAID is a viable alternative because the performance isn't worth the price of a hardware RAID solution.

Point is, though, that vowing acts of violence including suicide in reaction to problems a particular product might have is inappropriate and indicative of imbalance.
 
mikeblas said:
I've used Highpoint cards in a few of my workstations over the years and haven't had trouble. I don't use them in servers, since the servers I build demand hardware RAID for performance, and management interfaces for monitoring. For systems that don't see a lot of load, software RAID is a viable alternative because the performance isn't worth the price of a hardware RAID solution.

Point is, though, that vowing acts of violence including suicide in reaction to problems a particular product might have is inappropriate and indicative of imbalance.
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I think he was joking about shooting himself. ;)

As for highpoint, they don't do software RAID, that can be done through any controller card as it is controlled and monitored through the OS, not the RAID controller. They do do FakeRAID which imo is very bad and has had bad performance, relative to similar controller cards.
 
Red Falcon said:
I think he was joking about shooting himself. ;)
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No less inappropriate.

Red Falcon said:
As for highpoint, they don't do software RAID, that can be done through any controller card as it is controlled and monitored through the OS, not the RAID controller. They do do FakeRAID which imo is very bad and has had bad performance, relative to similar controller cards.
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What you're calling "fakeraid" is still software RAID; it's generally implemented by the driver.
 
mikeblas said:
No less inappropriate.

What you're calling "fakeraid" is still software RAID; it's generally implemented by the driver.
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Yeah, they both use the CPU, but they are far from the same. FakeRAID has none of the advantages of software or hardware RAID, but has all of the weaknesses of both. You might want to check wiki on this, they are very different. I'd take software RAID over FakeRAID any day.
 
Don't worry about me -- I'm pretty relaxed.

Where did I say they were the same? I just said they're both implemented in software.
 
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