RAID0 or RAID5 PERC 5i or M5015

Had a PERC5i for 2 years and had absolutely no complaints about it except that it didn't support over 2TB drives. But I paid $20 & $25 for both of the units I had, and they both included the battery backup units, which worked the whole time.

I had 5x2TB on mine and did have to do a rebuild once and it took I think about 12 hours. I also was able to grow it from the original 4x2TB to 5x2TB and during both situations I never lost use of the array.

In RAID5 the PERC5i will easily saturate a gigabit. I think I could get around 135MB/s when transferring local, but I only used over network.

But it sounds like the 2TB limit might be an issue for you. The PERC5i will support at minimum 8 drives If you use a 2x SFF-8484 to 4x SATA. But that is only 16TB and you'll loose 2 to parity, so 12TB useable.

And that's the reason the PERC5i's are so stupid cheap for the great performance and useage they provide. 1/10th the price of the M5015.

The next cheapest Dell's that support greater then 2TB are the H200 & H310, both around $70-100 on eBay. I have no experience with those though.
 
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You sir are a gentlemen and a scholar. Looks like I will have to look closer at the M5015 and the newer Dell controllers.
 
Why RAID 5 by chance? I run RAID 10.

So... I didn't get any help on my situation posting here, but I came to my own conclusions on a RAID card upgrade.

So I have an Adaptec 2405. I mean it was doing OK but I can tell more traffic to my website & other stuff on my network is starting to bog down a card with no cache doing ESXi VM work. So I checked around between all the different cards, & was looking for something with a good value that would give better performance.

What I came up with buying is a LSI 9260-8i with BBU & a hardware key for advanced features to make use of cachecade combining that with a Samsung 850 Pro 256GB. I already had the Samsung drive so that wasn't costing me anything for this project.

So... I pondered over every different option out there. I read about flashing Dell & IBM M5015's to LSI & such, but if you ever want to do cachecade you can't. The IBM cards HAVE TO HAVE IBM hardware keys, which none are for sale on ebay & ones you can find are usually $300-$400 for legit hardware keys, negating any savings. You have to pay attention as IBM has 2, a extra feature key which is only extra RAID, & a performance key which is cachecade. If you strictly want to use it without the advanced features, then it is an excellent buy.

The 9260 & 9280 are the cheaper cards that allow hardware keys. A software cachecade key for all other LSI cards is $250, no way to discount it even if you only need to use it for personal home use & are not a business & you can only transfer it ONCE to ONE new card in the future. So I did some ebay shopping. I found the 9260-8i for $160 with BBU & free ship. I got a hardware key from a chinaman. They're legit hardware keys that work & did a best offer of $75. He may even drop his price lower than $75 for them if your interested.

Check out these benchmarks of a RAID10 with & without CC. It was pretty convincing to me. I mean you can always pick up a LSI 9260 & buy the HW key in the future if you want to expand to cachecade.

Finally I picked up some quality SFF8087 to SATA cables. Best price on Amazon, with Prime shipping, & brand new. Price was double cost of Amazon for new cable on ebay.

That's what I came up with for a upgrade for my home server. I think I will be pretty happy with the results I see for about $265.

Extra Cachecade Info

If you have a bigger budget or need more performance, you can do a 9265-8i, 9266-4i, 9266-8i, 9285-8e & 9285CV-8e. Those all support HW keys too, but they are not discounted any on ebay like the 9260/9280. Pretty sure same prices on ebay from China are what you can get them for retail here. So this is more performance oriented as it is quite a bit more expensive option for the minimal performance gain you would probably see. You could also do any other controller you like granted they would require the software key which is $250. AFAIK any OEM typed controllers you more than likely won't be able to acquire the needed stuff. Only exception I've possibly heard of was some Intel cards having cachecade enabled by default I believe. I didn't check heavily into that option though.

Also you can have up to 512GB of SSDs as CC. When you set them up I believe you can also config the CC drives as a RAID0 which gives you even more performance boost. I think I will be happy with just the one Samsung 850 Pro though.
 
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i hate now on many raid card you need to basically buy licenses to add cache features.
 
Given a choice between RAID 0 and RAID 5 I would wonder what you primary concern is.

Assuming you're looking for performance (which I take from 0 being an option) you should not even bother with RAID 5 ... with the size of drives these days the rebuild times for a failed disk are absurd, and performance while that's happening is abysmal.

Your decision should probably be between RAID 0 & 10

They will perform about the same, but 0 will have double the capacity vs 10 having resilience against hardware failure.

Pretty rare that 5 is the right choice these days.
 
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