RAID controller and HDD suggestions

[RanceJustice]

Hello all. Well, seeing as how my array went down because of a bad drive, this is a good excuse for me to buy some new storage. I could use some advice.

First off, I'm wondering if I should buy a SATA RAID controller card. Is it worth it to get an external solution, or use the onboard raid controller on newer motherboards? I was thinking of finding at least a 4 port, SATA TCQ and NCQ enabled raid card. Any suggestion for brands? My current promise card has been pretty good to me, but I'm not sure if all their cards suffer from inferior Linux drivers or just the TX2Plus. THis however, is not a huge issue. I'd like to have a card capable of RAID 5, if possible.

Next are the drives themselves. I'm thinking of the two 74gb Raptors plus a larger storage drive if possible. Does this sound like a decent plan?

 

[DougLite]

A desktop user is unlikely to benefit from having a second Raptor. As for the larger storage drive, one of the 16MB cache drives from WD or Maxtor would be a good choice. If you are going to use the drive solely for storing media and not programs, then a Seagate will porbably work well too.

If you are going to play in the RAID-5 world, stepping up to a good hardware accelerated RAID controller is worthwhile. However, your budget may rule this out, and you may be able to get by with software performance (streaming videos don't require anything special performance wise).

 

[RanceJustice]

Thanks Doug! Your statement gives me the impression that Maxtor or WD are superior to Seagate in some way. Am I missing something?

Could you suggest some good PCI or PCI-E RAID controllers? I'm not looking for super-high end server kinda stuff, just something that I could eventually RAID 5 with, has support for SATA, TCQ, NCQ, 4 port etc...

 

[unhappy_mage]

Thanks Doug! Your statement gives me the impression that Maxtor or WD are superior to Seagate in some way. Am I missing something?

Could you suggest some good PCI or PCI-E RAID controllers? I'm not looking for super-high end server kinda stuff, just something that I could eventually RAID 5 with, has support for SATA, TCQ, NCQ, 4 port etc...

The Seagate drives are slower than the Maxtor or WD would be. They're quieter, though, so if that's your priority, they're still a consideration.

The Highpoint 1820 and 2220 look good for the cheaper end; they support almost all of the features of say an Areca card, but at a much lower price point. Only up to 8 drives per card, though, if that's an issue They do take a bigger CPU hit, but if it's in a seperate file server box, that shouldn't matter.

 

[RanceJustice]

Wow. Those are great cards, but according to Newegg they are PCI-X! Can you reccommend something PCI-E or PCI that supports 4 drives? Also, I'm currently using a Promise FastTrakTX2Plus in my current rig, so I'm looking for something a step up from that in terms of performance and features. For the moment, this array is going to be part of my main rig, not a dedicated file server. Thanks!

 

[defakto]

You can plug pci-x cards into std pci slots, you just can't get full bandwidth from the card its self.

 

[RanceJustice]

Oooh! Sorry, I was uninformed of that. So Highpoint is the best there is in the 100-250 pricerange?

 

[longblock454]

The Seagate drives are slower than the Maxtor or WD would be. They're quieter, though, so if that's your priority, they're still a consideration.

The Highpoint 1820 and 2220 look good for the cheaper end; they support almost all of the features of say an Areca card, but at a much lower price point. Only up to 8 drives per card, though, if that's an issue They do take a bigger CPU hit, but if it's in a seperate file server box, that shouldn't matter.

They have a new 16 port card now, based on the 2220.

 

[defakto]

Oooh! Sorry, I was uninformed of that. So Highpoint is the best there is in the 100-250 pricerange?

Also, I was assuming you meant pci-x and not pci-express, which some people do occasionally.