RAID controllers are too expensive

Welcome to the world of RAID. I'm guessing you've never really looked at true hardware RAID cards before, because that's a pretty typical price. From what I've seen, under a $100/port is a decent price. This is one of the reasons WHS is so popular. It allows us to setup a home system with expandable, somewhat redundant storage without paying for enterprise-class hardware.
 
price != complexity

The adaptec card linked above is a consumer level card - I don't know a single enterprise outfit that would touch it with a 10' pole. Of course "consumer level" is relative here, 99% of consumers don't need/want a RAID card, let alone a 8-port card with a dual core processor like that.
 
Yes, I agree it is more complex than a standard controller card, and thus more expensive.

As to linux software raid, love the idea but no boot off raid == fail.
 
Well the difference in software raid 5 on the cheap and good hardware raid is big. Take and ICH10R and throw a 3 or 4 drive raid 5 on it you will get somewhere around 100-150mb reads and around 8-15mb writes. Throw those same drives on a good hardware raid hard and you will get 160mb writes and 200mb reads or so. granted these aren't scientific numbers but they are within the ball park of what to expect. That is the main reason why i switched over to hardware raid cards for my setups. Copying 1.5tb + of data to a raid 5 on a software chipset takes forever at 10mb/s.
 
You don't have to pay full newegg price for a raid card - you can usually find pretty decent deals on fleabay, or open-box deals. If you need boot support, I would just look for a very simple raid card that supports raid0/1. Putting parity-based raid on your boot partition is slow and not recommended - if you want redundancy use raid1 or raid10.

If you want parity for media/data, there's two ways to go about it: just get simple HBAs and use some variety of software raid (Linux, ZFS, etc), or get a multiport raid6 card. Considering how cheap general purpose CPUs are, the software raid method will probably be cheaper and just as good in performance, but you may need a dedicated server system if your main PC is windows based. Which leads to the problem of interconnects between your main PC and your server - I just bought a bunch of 10GB infiniband equipment for dirt cheap on ebay (enterprises are switching to 10gigE and dumping their infiniband stuff) which should allow close to direct-attach access speed.

I'm thinking about writing up a raid controller card guide myself, going into more details about compatibility, management, and features much more in depth than the cursory reviews you see everywhere that only measure superficial stuff like sustained linear transfer rates on hdtach. I need more experience with the lesser-used brands though, like the Promise supertrak cards, the Atto cards, and so forth...
 
Plus there is the fact that less units get sold than of the latest, cheapest, crappiest processor, and thus cost per unit goes up. Economies of scale.
 
I'm actually in the market for a good (as in fast and stable) pci-e HBA for linux. Very hard to find. Most are either crap (pci-e x1, or pci) or expensive.
 
Unfortunately percs cannot be flashed to act as standard HBAs.
They're fine for simple raid5 or raid0 but I wouldn't use them for software raid.
You have unwanted RAID overhead slowing things down for software raid.

What's needed is something like that 8-port supermicro SATA HBA,
but for PCIe and not PCI-X, and cheap ($100 or less).
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be such a thing.

LSI and Adaptec both sell PCI-E SAS HBAs,
but they're ridiculously expensive for what you get,
and you're required to use the more expensive
miniSAS cables rather than simple sata-to-sata connections.

I have an Adaptec SAS HBA that works with a SAS
expander, but the SAS expander has compatibility issues
with all my seagate drives, which kind of makes it a moot point.
 
alamone said:
Unfortunately percs cannot be flashed to act as standard HBAs.
They're fine for simple raid5 or raid0 but I wouldn't use them for software raid.
You have unwanted RAID overhead slowing things down for software raid.

What's needed is something like that 8-port supermicro SATA HBA,
but for PCIe and not PCI-X, and cheap ($100 or less).
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be such a thing.

LSI and Adaptec both sell PCI-E SAS HBAs,
but they're ridiculously expensive for what you get,
and you're required to use the more expensive
miniSAS cables rather than simple sata-to-sata connections.

I have an Adaptec SAS HBA that works with a SAS
expander, but the SAS expander has compatibility issues
with all my seagate drives, which kind of makes it a moot point.
Click to expand...

Huh? If you can get hardware RAID 5 for under $200, why would you want software RAID? There's Linux management tools for it.
 
I have been running on a Perc 5i for a couple of weeks now. My only complaint with it is that the Bios takes about 20 seconds to see the drives. Nice and quick after that.

Get a PCI bracket with it. Most have only the Dell hardware with them. Also, get the battery and cable with the card. More expensive to buy it later. You will also need to pick up at least 1 SFF-8484 to 4 X SATA connector cables. One can be had here for 12 bux. And last but not least, the Dell servers have a fan blowing on the card. You need to have a fan blowing right on the heatsink. I just tie wrapped a 40 mm fan right to the card.

Don
 
Some choose to spend $1000 on video cards. Others choose to spend $1000 on RAID cards. It's all relative.
 
Blue Fox said:
My video card was 1/10th the price of my RAID card. I think I have my priorities straight. :p
Click to expand...

how do i factor in how much integrated video on my mobos cost ;)

@mjz_5: you also jumped right up to a decent hw raid card, i'm sure you can find a used older model for considerably cheaper.
 
There is always the PERC 5/i on eBay for ~$125. You won't get anything else like that for anywhere near that price.
 
I think I'm gonna go with 2 or 3 of the pci-e 1x SI3132 cards. Cheap and dirty HBA, should be fine for software raid0.
 
well, right now i got 3 pci 4port sata controllers in my server... i think 20 bucks each at monoprice... but i would love to be able to get a nice 8 port card and connected directly into my computer and have 150+ read and writes all the time..

i think a motherboard is alot harder to make than a stupid raid card.. nothing has changed with them in years, really, it probably costs them nothing...
 
mjz_5 said:
well, right now i got 3 pci 4port sata controllers in my server... i think 20 bucks each at monoprice... but i would love to be able to get a nice 8 port card and connected directly into my computer and have 150+ read and writes all the time..

i think a motherboard is alot harder to make than a stupid raid card.. nothing has changed with them in years, really, it probably costs them nothing...
Click to expand...

There probably is an element of price discrimination in the mix, yes, but keep in mind that these RAID controllers are made for the enterprise storage market, where data integrity and reliabilty is key. These RAID controllers also feature their own CPUs for parity calculations, as well as its own cache memory.

So yes, anyone can say "a RAID card costs less to make than a motherboard", but that doesn't mean their functionality isn't just as important, if not more important, and the price that comes along with the equipment isn't excessive, either.

Unless someone makes RAID controllers geared towards average consumers (and that would mean such demand for a controller of this sort would be as much as for something like, say, a graphics card), then maybe we might start seeing better prices. You get what you pay for, and in this case, an expensive hardware RAID controller will always trump a $20 Silicon Image PCI "RAID" controller.
 
drgnfang said:
Yes, I agree it is more complex than a standard controller card, and thus more expensive.

As to linux software raid, love the idea but no boot off raid == fail.
Click to expand...

Hm, I wonder how my 2 linux servers both with software RAID 10 are able to boot...? It must be doing the impossible :p
 
alamone said:
Unfortunately percs cannot be flashed to act as standard HBAs.
They're fine for simple raid5 or raid0 but I wouldn't use them for software raid.
You have unwanted RAID overhead slowing things down for software raid.

What's needed is something like that 8-port supermicro SATA HBA,
but for PCIe and not PCI-X, and cheap ($100 or less).
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be such a thing.

LSI and Adaptec both sell PCI-E SAS HBAs,
but they're ridiculously expensive for what you get,
and you're required to use the more expensive
miniSAS cables rather than simple sata-to-sata connections.

I have an Adaptec SAS HBA that works with a SAS
expander, but the SAS expander has compatibility issues
with all my seagate drives, which kind of makes it a moot point.
Click to expand...

Actually it does exist:

http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-aoc-usas-l8i~7SUPM18C.htm

I am not really sure on what its performance is though. The limit of the PCI-X supermicro card was around 700 MB reads and 350-380MB/sec writes.
 
houkouonchi said:
Actually it does exist:

http://www.provantage.com/supermicro-aoc-usas-l8i~7SUPM18C.htm

I am not really sure on what its performance is though. The limit of the PCI-X supermicro card was around 700 MB reads and 350-380MB/sec writes.
Click to expand...
Don't forget that that thing is intended for Supermicro servers and the mounting bracket won't exactly line up (not to mention the components are on the wrong side compared to normal cards, so you lose an extra slot on top of that).
 
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