Raid5 Controller card recommendations?

K

KleeziE

Limp Gawd
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Mar 7, 2009
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I have never purchased one before but I am on to my 4th 1TB hard drive and I figured I would go to a raid 5 setup to get more bang for my buck spacewise. So i am kinda in over my head in this area of computer products (raid controllers) and was hoping you guys could recommend a card that wont break the bank for me since this is just a simple media server for my home.

Thanks ahead of time:)
 
Move to higher capacity disks.... really. Adding a decent RAID 5 controller with BBWC will cost more than buying 4x 2TB drives that you can run in RAID 10 on chipset RAID implementations and 4 onboard ports. Plus, if your chipset supports RAID 10, then you don't have to worry about RAID controller-motherboard incompatibility.

Beyond four drives, you will realize you want RAID 6 and again decent performance and that will cost even more.
 
Perhaps you shouldn't buy a RAID controller, but instead focus on backups and keep 2 separate disks + 2 for backup, just an idea.

Like onboard RAID, most hardware RAID controllers require TLER-enabled disks, so called RAID edition harddrives. You pay a premium for those, and a single RAID5 without backup is ALOT less safe than you might think! RAID0 would also be an option; assuming you keep very good backups and losing data in between backups is of no huge concern. But i would never drop a backup believing that RAID will protect me.
 
TBH I cant see myself using that much storage space than 3TB. And I guess i was hoping to use raid 5 because what i have read about it, it is more efficient than raid 1 (i get 1 more tb) and it has parity if a drive fails.

The drives I am using are: SAMSUNG EcoGreen F2 HD103SI 1TB

Not sure if those are "raid edition" harddrives but i got them to have lower noise cause its out in the tv room as my htpc/file server.

I am not super concerned with performance i guess since its just used to store videos and access them from time to time. Main thing i was trying to go for with the idea of a raid 5 is parity for peace of mind and maximizing the amount i can store.

Are their raid controllers that are less "serious" for entry level raids for home use? Or should I consider another avenue like a mobo that supports onboard raid 5 or consider software raid?
 
it isnt more efficient over all.

Each raid level has it's perc and down sides.

today large drives, if a drive dies in a raid 5, your looking at a day to rebuild it, and if during that rebuild another drive dies, you loose everything

raid 1 with 2 /3 drives is safer, if one drive dies, you got the other, if that one dies you have the 3rd.

Onboard raid 5 may run like crap, i have seen some people it runs fine, when i tried raid 5 on an intel ICHR i got crap performance and ram usage went through the roof.
 
Think about RAID 1 or RAID 10. The real reason is because you get good performance (if you look at big storage vendors, RAID 10 is what they tend to benchmark with for redundant storage configurations), and the hardware requirements are minimal. Going "wild" with RAID 10 would get you a LSI SAS 2008 based card like the 9211-8i but those are much less than RAID 5 controllers.
 
Well i guess i will nix the whole raid 5 idea then. Think i could get a dependable controller for under 100 bux for a 4 sata II raid 1 setup?

Or do you think its an ok idea to just stay with using my onboard controller?
 
Go onboard software RAID for best bang for your buck. A low end Intel-based board with 6 ports ($70-100) and RAID5. I use Green and Blue WD drives (non-Raid Edition) and they rarely ever have any issues apart from predicted failures.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Each raid level has it's perc and down sides.
Click to expand...

I saw what you did there! :D And you're absolutely right. :p

@OP

Truthfully, RAID 5/6 is only worth considering if you have a) a decent software RAID stack (think Linux & OpenSolaris) or b) a decent hardware RAID card (cheap if you know where to look (eBay); see link above).

Failing that, something like Windows Home Server with Drive Extender or Amahi Home Server with Greyhole might be worth a look.
 
terayon1515 said:
Go onboard software RAID for best bang for your buck. A low end Intel-based board with 6 ports ($70-100) and RAID5. I use Green and Blue WD drives (non-Raid Edition) and they rarely ever have any issues apart from predicted failures.
Click to expand...
It should all work, until you hit a Pending sector on one your drives, then the disk will be detached and considered as completely failed even if just one sector is unreadable. It is the timeout of 10 seconds that causes the RAID engine to disconnect that disk and kick it out of the array. This is extremely common especially on higher density disks (2TB) where uBER appear to proliferate.

This also applies to RAID1, and applies all Windows-based onboard RAID and most Hardware RAIDs. This is why you need 'TLER' or RAID edition harddrives for safe operation using these strict RAID engines.

A horror-scenario:
1) You run an onboard RAID5; no problems for over a year!
2) Now one disk fails; no problem you have a replacement!
3) During the rebuild, another disk develops a BAD sector (uBER) which is quite common.
4) The rebuild stops, the RAID5 array comes in a failed state with 2 devices missing; without expert recovery this would mean total dataloss

If you're on Windows platform or use hardware RAID with strict timeouts, you should really focus most on your efforts to protect your data on backups rather than RAID. RAID alone cannot protect you especially not the low-quality RAID solutions commonly available to Windows platform.

Some hardware RAID would not have this problem, but i've yet to see a list of hardware controllers that don't kick out drives after 10 seconds of timeout; so i'd consider these suspect as well.

Point is, RAID never really gave the user that he/she expected, due to the talk about theoretical failure in RAID configurations. But the reality is different and i would consider an onboard RAID5 to be less secure than a single disk without any form of protection.

So invest in backups instead of relying on RAID to protect your data, or you might be unpleasantly surprised one day.
 
sub.mesa said:
It should all work, until you hit a Pending sector on one your drives, then the disk will be detached and considered as completely failed even if just one sector is unreadable. It is the timeout of 10 seconds that causes the RAID engine to disconnect that disk and kick it out of the array. This is extremely common especially on higher density disks (2TB) where uBER appear to proliferate.
Click to expand...
Enabling TLER (on WD Green and Blue drives) using the command prompt isn't too difficult if you have the time to spare to turn each one on before using it on a error-time restrictive controllers. Saving hundreds on a small purchase of a couple drives.

I am looking into a non-Windows configuration soon. But low-speed/high cap./low-cost nearline storage is where I am at right now :-P

I had a Dell PERC 5/i card I bought on eBay that failed and caused massive corruption on rebuilds, something I have been able to reproduce a few times and is possibly the result of a bad processor. I have thought about a 6/i as they are bound to be newer and have the added parity-redundancy level.
 
terayon1515 said:
Enabling TLER (on WD Green and Blue drives) using the command prompt isn't too difficult if you have the time to spare to turn each one on before using it on a error-time restrictive controllers. Saving hundreds on a small purchase of a couple drives.
Click to expand...

The Caviar Greens won't accept TLER, and I have to assume the Caviar Blues won't either. Apparently the newer Caviar Blacks (FAEX & AAEX models) are good for "desktop RAID", so I assume they will accept the setting of TLER.
 
Caviar Green's *DO* accept TLER

Even the WD20EARS, which I own and have TLER'ed.
Especially the Blues, WD5000AAKS, which I have owned over 25 can be TLER enabled.
Same with the WD15EADS drives, and the WD10EACS, EAMS, EAVS, EADS.

Not sure where you heard they couldn't...
 
My information is that only the older EADS could set TLER, but the newer EADS produced after a certain date and all EARS do not have TLER capability. So WD forces you to go RAID edition for the TLER feature.

If you say you have EARS and TLER enabled, well.. are you sure? It's the first time i hear this, and a quick google on EARS and TLER only yields sources that TLER does not work on EARS.
 
sub.mesa said:
My information is that only the older EADS could set TLER, but the newer EADS produced after a certain date and all EARS do not have TLER capability. So WD forces you to go RAID edition for the TLER feature.
Click to expand...

Apologies! TLER does not function on EARS's drives and the later EADS's

I have some WD20EADS drives I TLER'ed and that's why I got confused :eek: - The Caviar Blues I have have (AAKS's) never had an issue getting TLER turned on, but it's possible newer rev's have had the TLER capability disabled at the factory, like the EARS and later EADS.

softRAID or fakeRAID usually doesn't *have* to have drives with TLER, same with *nix based software RAID's. But Hardware and MS soft-RAID are not as tolerant and would need it.

On a large (4TB+) softRAID - leaving TLER off can be better than having a 2TB+ array member drive give up on fixing an error while rebuilding a degraded array, resulting possibly in corrupt data. Am I right to assume leaving it off in this case is a good idea? ;)
 
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parityboy is right.

you should also consider what you will be storing on the drives. If it's just a media library of movies, then raid 5 is ok. If you want to store pictures, documents, etc. (important stuff) then make back up disks, USB drives etc. And use a raid 6. I've gotten into the habit of forcing consistency checks on my raid arrays. There have been a few articles about how due to single parity, raid 5 arrays increase the number of errors as you get closer to 10TB.

that said, i have (had) a 10 year old adaptec card running in a pc that i just turned off for the last time with 3 maxtor 200GB ide drives. Never one crash, ever.....

There is a Hitachi 2TB drive for sale (look in HotDeals) for 69.99 from amazon.
 
Thanks all for sharing all this knowledge with me, it will be put to good use to protect my media server data.
 
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