RAID5 Controller Card Advice?

[doublea]

Hey,

I'm looking to set up an inexpensive, but reliable 500gb raid 5 array (probably 3x 250gb IDE). Where I'm stuck is the controller Card.

Does anyone have any recommendations on good IDE cards to use? Also, I may want to upgrade this by doubling the size in the next year or so. Would it be possible to just drop in 2 more drives?

Any advice on cards would be greatly appreciated.

-AA

 

[budec]

I heard good things about 3Dware cards, but never used them myself. Adptec makes really nice SCSI cards (have 2 of them), but not sure how their RAID cards are.


Promise makes really inexpesnive raid cards.

 

[rottweiler]

3ware is awsome from all the research I've done, and lots of forum advice.
Also, the 3ware 9000 series is supposed to have an updated bios out this summer that will allow the addition of drives to a raid 5 array.
However, I do not believe any manufacturer currently has that capability.
Also, inexpensive is very relative.
The 4port 3ware card is $360 from newegg.
But if you want more expandability later the 8port is $500.
You'd need the -8, not the -8MI, MI has some weird connectors.
But you do want a card that doesn't use software processing and hence more cpu overhead.
You will not find a "cheap" card that does this, although there probably is a cheaper one than 3ware.

 

[Dumass_Freakboy]

If i'm not mistaken your looking for a raid5 board /w a XOR cpu in it? To do the calculations instead of your cpu (if you don't get one.. depending on your computer it could use up to 100% of your cpu when doing heavy writing to it).

I was looking up some such boards a while ago, and the Promise SX6000 & SX4000 looked very promising, and were quite cheap when it comes to pricing. Both have inboard XOR processors. The only main difference between the two is the number of ide channels (if i remember correctly), which is 4 and 6 respecively (also the price).

I could buy the SX6000 for $365 canadian which would be about $255 american.
A review for each if you would like.
http://www.cluboverclocker.com/reviews/raid/sx4000/
http://storagereview.com/articles/200110/20011031SX6000_1.html

To add another hard drive after you have already created a raid array (to increase the size) is currently not a feature of any raid5 cards I know of. Your only solution would be to rebuild a new array whenever you added new hard drives. But if you were to add new disks, be sure they are the same model. (Seagate 7,200rpm drives /w 8m cache 200g.... ST3200822A)

 

[infocalypse]

FWIW, I'm selling a 3ware 9500-4lp card. I'd originally planned to go SATA, but went for SCSI RAID instead.

$300 plus shipping from CA, includes 4 standard 18" SATA cables and 4 shielded 9" SATA cables. Comes with original box and manual.

I've also got four new 120gb WD SATA drives for sale, $100 each. I'd prefer to sell all four at once, tho. Free shipping on these if you buy all four.

 

[unhappy_mage]

you do indeed need a card with the "hardware" XOR engine. 3ware is top in my book. The 8mi is not a no-no; in fact it's newer & better. It has "multilane" connectors so more than one drive connects to each port. This reduces the # of cables going into the card, and makes your case less spaghetti like. This is a good thing.

Promise cards are also okay, but you may or may not need some pc133 to stick into the onbaord slot. It depends if they come with memory or not. If you need some, I have 256ecc that I could let go for $40 or so.

if you're not too worried about speed, then look at the software options available. linux has built in support for raid 0 1 5 and any combination of the above. For fun I once built a raid 55 array with 9 cheap ide disks. total capacity about 8gb (the smallest disk was 2gb). speed was something awful. this was not a production server. but i had redundancy on my redundancy. don't try it at home.