RAID me up!

S

Sovereign

2[H]4U
Joined
Mar 21, 2005
Messages
3,098
I believe it is true that the serious storage gurus among us do not use "motherboard" RAID. Someone at another forum was nice enough to point out to me that with dual 750GB drives and the potential of adding a third, if something went south I'd be screwed. That's a lot of data to lose.

What I Have
- abit IP35-Pro motherboard with a free PCI-E 1x slot (for RAID card)
- Dual 750GB drives independently configured that have data on them

What I Want
- An inexpensive (sub-$100 if possible) RAID5 card (must have 4 ports or more, I presume, since cards come in 2, 4, 8, 16 etc)
- The ability to create RAID5 from the two drives I have, plus the at least one more drive I'm going to buy if this works, without losing anything

Redundancy is the primary concern (without wasting as much space as RAID1 would). If I get the same performance out of this RAID5 that I got out of a single drive, I don't care. I store stuff. I don't run databases or anything.

If you feel the need to chime in supporting motherboard RAID (or anything that would drive down the price without sacrificing reliability) feel free to do so.
 
Sovereign said:
- The ability to create RAID5 from the two drives I have, plus the at least one more drive I'm going to buy if this works, without losing anything
Click to expand...

I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but the array building process will by its nature wipe out the data on the drives. This doesn't change regardless of the controller. Once the array is already built,however, the more expensive controllers will support online capacity expansion (OCE) to add new drives while maintaining the data.
 
Shockey said:
RAID IS NOT A BACKUP

Also you cant create a Raid 5 array with only 2 drives. the minimum required is 3. So you need that 3rd disk ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

As for what card for below 100. I leave that to someone else.
Click to expand...

I'm aware of all these things. I will use RAID5 assuming I buy a third drive. I'm aware RAID does not function as a backup, but it is certainly better than independent drives.

vectravl400 said:
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but the array building process will by its nature wipe out the data on the drives. This doesn't change regardless of the controller. Once the array is already built,however, the more expensive controllers will support online capacity expansion (OCE) to add new drives while maintaining the data.
Click to expand...

I know NVIDIA used to allow RAID Morphing, but it seems I'll have to find some large-capacity drives to write to while I create a RAID array then.
 
If you don't mind buying used hardware with little or no warranty, you could buy a Dell Perc 5/i card off eBay for ~$100 or so plus two of these SFF-8484 to 4 x SATA Cables for ~$25. Thus, you get 8 ports and a true hardware RAID controller for around ~$125 or so. Add a battery backup unit for ~$40 and you're set in case of power outages as well up the performance. Not a bad deal considering that a new true PCI-E hardware RAID controller is around $300 (Areca ARC-1210) for 4 ports.

EDIT: As of May 2009, it seems that you can find many Perc 5/i cards with the BBU and PCI bracket for $120 and under. Excellent price!

But those Dell Perc 5/i cards are finicky about motherboards. It will take up PCI-E x16 slot if you don't have a PCI-E x8 slot.

Read these threads for more info:
Dell Perc 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks
Finally went to a Hardware Raid5 controller...
Dell Perc 5/i - Mainboard Compatibility List
Solution for Dell Perc 5/i for Intel Chipsets
Add 8 device SAS/SATA 256MB BBU Enterprise class RAID card to your rig for about $100 w/ PERC 5i (LSI 8480E OEMed to Dell)
 
Danny Bui said:
If you don't mind buying used hardware with little or no warranty, you could buy a Dell Perc 5/i card off eBay for ~$100 or so plus two of these SFF-8484 to 4 x SATA Cables for ~$25. Thus, you get 8 ports and a true hardware RAID controller for around ~$125 or so. Add a battery backup unit for ~$40 and you're set in case of power outages as well up the performance. Not a bad deal considering that a new true PCI-E hardware RAID controller is around $300 (Areca ARC-1210) for 4 ports.

EDIT: As of May 2009, it seems that you can find many Perc 5/i cards with the BBU and PCI bracket for $120 and under. Excellent price!

But those Dell Perc 5/i cards are finicky about motherboards. It will take up PCI-E x16 slot if you don't have a PCI-E x8 slot.

Read these threads for more info:
Dell Perc 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks
Finally went to a Hardware Raid5 controller...
Dell Perc 5/i - Mainboard Compatibility List
Solution for Dell Perc 5/i for Intel Chipsets
Add 8 device SAS/SATA 256MB BBU Enterprise class RAID card to your rig for about $100 w/ PERC 5i (LSI 8480E OEMed to Dell)
Click to expand...

And this is why I love [H], thanks for the info! Only problem I see is the whole "I only have a 1x slot free" business. Also, does it need memory installed or can it run without?
 
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