Raid Controller

[Mrk121]

Hey everyone,

I am looking for a good raid controller card. I would prefer one that can be booted from as well as a minimum of 8 Sata II or III ports. My main goal for this controller would be to allow me to raid 0+1 8 SSDs. I want to get a main drive with about a half terabyte of space and at least 1 GBps transfer rate.

Any good recommendations would be appreciated with a focus on 8 ports and the boot-ability.

 

[sub.mesa]

Can i know what your array will be used for?
You do know Hardware RAID limits the speed of multiple SSDs running in RAID0?

According to some internet tests, the Areca appears limited to 70.000 IOps; that's something you reach with a single Intel X25-M 80GB (512 bytes) or two Intel X25-M in RAID0 (4K).

That means you will be wasting a lot of performance potential by using hardware RAID. The latency, the big advantage of SSDs over HDDs, would also be higher than necessary.

Generally, you should use onboard RAID or software RAID; to make your CPU do the work and not be limited to a offloaded CPU which is much slower than your main CPU. As HDDs reach only 100 IOps per drive, the 70.000 IOps limit sounds high. But with SSDs it is reached easily.

For your information, i run 5 Intel SSDs in RAID0 on onboard ports and get 1234MB/s of random read (4K - 128K) performance. Thus, if you want to get the maximum performance you would have to look at host-based RAID solutions.

I also think you could forget RAID10 and go RAID0 instead, paired with a larger HDD acting as backup; which you sync every night or so.