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Recommend a good Raid controller
- Thread starter Webberson
- Start date
Highpoint or LSI would be worth looking for if you're on a budget.
Know that RAIDs break easily with normal disks, due to them being disconnected in case of an active bad sector causing a timeout (longer than 10 seconds). So conventional RAID with normal harddrives is quite unreliable.
What exactly is your goal? What do you want to achieve?
Know that RAIDs break easily with normal disks, due to them being disconnected in case of an active bad sector causing a timeout (longer than 10 seconds). So conventional RAID with normal harddrives is quite unreliable.
What exactly is your goal? What do you want to achieve?
wkearney99
Limp Gawd
- Joined
- Sep 8, 2010
- Messages
- 370
Bear in mind with some of the better RAID controllers you can set up more than one volume within an array of disks. So you could setup all four drives as an array, and then setup one boot volume for the OS and the rest for data. This also helps work around the 2tb max size boot volume restrictions in BIOS and windows.
From most of my reading both here and throughout the internets, the majority of controllers that aren't pricey will be software raid. Which is fine for backup applications in raid 1 or whatnot.
Unfortunately I could not point you to the lowest priced true hardware raid controllers or tell you if they're truly worth the price for consumer grade applications that we would run on them.
There are far more knowledgable people here who could help you identify true hardware raid controllers if that's what you're after.
Unfortunately I could not point you to the lowest priced true hardware raid controllers or tell you if they're truly worth the price for consumer grade applications that we would run on them.
There are far more knowledgable people here who could help you identify true hardware raid controllers if that's what you're after.
I have 6 SATA ports on my M/B. I have 4 hard drives, 1 removable bay (for backup) and 1 Sata DVD drive. Since I want to add 4 hard drives for my video editing, I thought I could do that with a raid array, and hence would be best to get a HW raid controller.
The other option would be to just get a plain sata controller to run the current 4 hard drives and then use the onboard Raid controller for the new hard drives.
The other option would be to just get a plain sata controller to run the current 4 hard drives and then use the onboard Raid controller for the new hard drives.
If you're going to connect HDDs then SATA 6Gbps is useless to you. The only use for 6Gbps HDD is when using expanders, to make the expander run at 6Gbps link speed instead of 3Gbps and thus have more bandwidth to share.
HDDs can do 150MB/s max, which is the limit of SATA/150 or 1,5Gbps aka SATA 1.0.
Performance of RAID depends on other factors instead. You should read about RAID before using it, and realize you need a 1:1 backup to protect your data. RAID, especially conventional RAID with a legacy filesystem underneath, fails at providing decent data security for home users who wish to use RAID instead of a backup.
Instead of increasing the data security, some RAID configurations may well lower the data security offered to your files, and actually cause dataloss which you would not have had if you used no RAID and just several volumes instead. RAID adds its own risk of failure, so it both reduces risk as well as introduce new risks of failure.
Think well before you spend a lot of money.
Thoughts:
First: LSI or Areca on the RAID controller brand. Highpoint is basically a consumer brand. If you trust your data to a controller brand that does not have a lot of big enterprise customers, then you can save money.
LSI is the de-facto leader in OEM wins for big companies like IBM, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Intel, and etc. Areca is probably the performance controller one might pull an OEM LSI card for. Both allow you to boot off of RAID volumes easily. You would be looking at LSI 9xxx series or Areca 18xx series cards for 6.0gbps SAS 2 or SATA III.
Adaptec 6 series is a bit of unknown at the moment. PMC Sierra 6.0gbps based 6 series cards were announced in mid-December so there is not a lot of information on them.
SATA 6.0gbps is not necessary in most cases with traditional disks to sub.mesa's point, but even the newest "green" drives can actually push max output of over 150MB/s so you do want at minimum SATA II.
One of the big improvements with the SAS 2/ SATA 6.0gbps cards is better compatibility with SATA drives and expanders.
When you say four internal connectors do you mean SFF-8087 connectors or 7-pin standard SATA connectors? It is the difference between a four port card and a sixteen port card, in other words a few hundred dollars.
What OS are you using? Do you care about redundancy on the four additional drives? If you only need RAID 0 or 10 then something like a LSI 9211-8i is an inexpensive 6.0gbps solution, or an IBM M1015 / LSI 9240 card. RAID 5/6 is where you start needing onboard cache and a battery back up unit.
First: LSI or Areca on the RAID controller brand. Highpoint is basically a consumer brand. If you trust your data to a controller brand that does not have a lot of big enterprise customers, then you can save money.
LSI is the de-facto leader in OEM wins for big companies like IBM, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Intel, and etc. Areca is probably the performance controller one might pull an OEM LSI card for. Both allow you to boot off of RAID volumes easily. You would be looking at LSI 9xxx series or Areca 18xx series cards for 6.0gbps SAS 2 or SATA III.
Adaptec 6 series is a bit of unknown at the moment. PMC Sierra 6.0gbps based 6 series cards were announced in mid-December so there is not a lot of information on them.
SATA 6.0gbps is not necessary in most cases with traditional disks to sub.mesa's point, but even the newest "green" drives can actually push max output of over 150MB/s so you do want at minimum SATA II.
One of the big improvements with the SAS 2/ SATA 6.0gbps cards is better compatibility with SATA drives and expanders.
When you say four internal connectors do you mean SFF-8087 connectors or 7-pin standard SATA connectors? It is the difference between a four port card and a sixteen port card, in other words a few hundred dollars.
What OS are you using? Do you care about redundancy on the four additional drives? If you only need RAID 0 or 10 then something like a LSI 9211-8i is an inexpensive 6.0gbps solution, or an IBM M1015 / LSI 9240 card. RAID 5/6 is where you start needing onboard cache and a battery back up unit.
SATA 6Gbps may also have power efficiency benefits as well as slightly higher IOps performance (propagation delay due to interface latency). But it appears alot of people are caught by the implied marketing that a 6Gbps HDD is alot better than a 3Gbps HDD. The truth is HDD performance scales very slowly. All they are doing is either increase the rpm or increase data density. Increasing the rpm isn't sexy anymore, and increasing data density is going at a slow pace. So don't expect HDDs to become much faster, unless they radically change such as a real hybrid flash+mechanical HDD.
@pjkenned: which green (5400rpm-class) disks can do over 150MB/s? The WD 3TB is slower than the Samsung F4 2TB which caps at 140MB/s. The 7200rpm F4 does 150MB/s so only a tad higher. I hope more manufacturers will come with 750GB platters at 5400rpm and see speeds of 175MB/s which is a nice step up especially considering the low spindle speed.
@pjkenned: which green (5400rpm-class) disks can do over 150MB/s? The WD 3TB is slower than the Samsung F4 2TB which caps at 140MB/s. The 7200rpm F4 does 150MB/s so only a tad higher. I hope more manufacturers will come with 750GB platters at 5400rpm and see speeds of 175MB/s which is a nice step up especially considering the low spindle speed.
So the Hitachi 5K3000's had a few runs at like 150.1MB/s 
but agreed not much higher. I actually threw out those runs since they were maybe a 10% chance to see those numbers so I never report things that look like benchmarking anomolies. Plus, 144MB/s+ is really the outer part of the disk so it is more like 60-145MB/s real world. Still... next gen is easily going over 150 and I'd bet if you put a SATA 3 144MB/s drive on a SATA 1 controller you will see less than 144MB/s.
Totally agreed on the 6.0gbps for mechanical drives though, but updating to the newest spec is usually neutral to beneficial on these things.
but agreed not much higher. I actually threw out those runs since they were maybe a 10% chance to see those numbers so I never report things that look like benchmarking anomolies. Plus, 144MB/s+ is really the outer part of the disk so it is more like 60-145MB/s real world. Still... next gen is easily going over 150 and I'd bet if you put a SATA 3 144MB/s drive on a SATA 1 controller you will see less than 144MB/s.Totally agreed on the 6.0gbps for mechanical drives though, but updating to the newest spec is usually neutral to beneficial on these things.
Yes SATA/150 might scale well for up to 120MB/s or so; just like the C300 that pulls > 300MB/s on SATA/600 but only 275-285MB/s on SATA/300. That's still very good use of the bandwidth though!
So the point is: SATA/300 will be okay for HDDs for quite some time. Of course if you can get 6Gbps then it can't hurt. But i am concerned about the powerful marketing this stuff creates on consumers, which then have very high expectations of performance. For example, some might think "well my HDD is 6Gbps so its better than your SSD of 3Gbps". That's what implied marketing does; by emphasizing on these less relevant specs, and not providing the most important specs (data density, rpm, controller/firmware used) the industry is effectively misleading consumers into believing certain stuff, which causes extra profit for the industry and distrust and disappointment for the consumer.
So the point is: SATA/300 will be okay for HDDs for quite some time. Of course if you can get 6Gbps then it can't hurt. But i am concerned about the powerful marketing this stuff creates on consumers, which then have very high expectations of performance. For example, some might think "well my HDD is 6Gbps so its better than your SSD of 3Gbps". That's what implied marketing does; by emphasizing on these less relevant specs, and not providing the most important specs (data density, rpm, controller/firmware used) the industry is effectively misleading consumers into believing certain stuff, which causes extra profit for the industry and distrust and disappointment for the consumer.
After thinking about everything that could go wrong with adding a raid array, I think I might bite the bullet and get a couple of SSD's. The problem is that i would still need a controller as I am out of SATA's on my motherboard. I am using 5 of the 6 already. I would probably use one SSD for booting Win7-64 plus programs, and one SSD for video editing.
1) Would I still be best to get a SATA controller that has raid (even though I don't use the raid)?
2) Any suggestions of controllers that are compatible with SSD's?
1) Would I still be best to get a SATA controller that has raid (even though I don't use the raid)?
2) Any suggestions of controllers that are compatible with SSD's?