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Recommendations on RAID card

R

Rocco123

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 24, 2006
Messages
481
I'm in the market for a new SATA RAID card, and I'd like some opinions.

I'm looking for a hardware SATA RAID card, PCI (NOT PCI-E), Just need it to support RAID 1 and 5. The PC that it's going into is currently using onboard sw RAID (NVRAID), and it sucks big time. I don't really care about the cost of it, since I'm not paying for it.

Would it be worth it to buy a new mainboard with an extra PCI-E slot, and get an Areca (it's an AN8)? I've heard good thing about these cards, but they only come in 64b PCI and PCI-E flavors. Speed isn't a huge issue, the apps that run on this machine are pretty small, but very important.

I've only found this one so far:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816118011
 
it really depends on how many drives you will be throwing on pci bus. i dont know raid extremely well, but 6 drives being accessed may be pushing the bus too far and you will get bogged down. but again, i dont know how much the bus will be filled up.
 
The LSI isn't terribly fast, but it'll work. The Areca will also work, it will just stick out the end of the slot a bit; as long as it physically fits (looks like it from the pics I found) it'll work fine. You could either get the pci-x version and use it with your current board, or buy a new board and the pci-e version. I'd tend to get the pci-e version; $600 is a big investment and the extra $90 for a new board means future compatibility and upgradeability.

 
As posted above the number of drives and total IO that is expected is a big part of it. It would appear from what you said above it appears that you are not going to have any trouble with a standard PCI bus limit. I would say that from personal experience if you want to go with a very solid card the 3ware or Areca are great choices. Dell also uses LSI and they are work pretty good for most. The big thing is that you are not doing high bandwidth (from what it seems above) so the big thing is to get a RAID card that comes from a company with a good track record and good reviews on the card. Going with a bigger brand card also reduces the chance of not being able to get another if the card fails and will generally be better tested.
 
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