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Request recommendation for RAID Controller

M

MrSticks

n00b
Joined
Jun 25, 2013
Messages
4
We bought a Dell Precession R5500 with a onboard RAID controller ICH10R. 2xWD5000BPKT disks were set up in a RAID1 configuration. Our intended purpose of this workstation was to have data written to it 24/7. After some research we determined that the WD5000BPKT disks did not meet our data write requirements. Since our system will only except 2.5” SATA drives we went with some Seagate Constellation.2 hard disks. We began to notice that the RAID was not so stable. Random rebuilds were making the system unusable for a good +6 hours. We suspect it is because we are using a software RAID (ICH10R) and not a hardware RAID. Is there a hardware RAID that anyone can suggest that would fit our current hardware specs.
Thank you for your help.
 
We suspect it is because we are using a software RAID (ICH10R) and not a hardware RAID.
Click to expand...

I would highly doubt that is the cause. And doesn't Intel call this a hw raid in raid 0 or 1. With that said I recommend LSI based SAS raid controllers.
 
Greetings

The WD5000BPKT's are consumer drives and are most likely missing the TLER/CCTL feature needed for hardware raid controllers, the Seagates are being sold on the basis that they are enterprise drives and would presumably have it and therefore should be OK.

The motherboard raid is not the best so a hardware controller is probably a better idea, since you are only after Raid 1 then the IBM M1015's (re-badged LSI cards) are highly regarded as hardware SAS controllers in their own right and also as simply extra ports in JBOD mode for use with ZFS filesystems.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/technotes/tips0740.pdf

A SAS controller is preferable over a SATA controller as the former would be of an enterprise standard capable of running both SAS and SATA (enterprise not consumer) hard drives, whereas the latter probably would not be to an enterprise standard.

If you do have a SAS controller and you find that the 7200 RPM SATA Seagates are still insufficient then you can replace these with 10K and 15K RPM Savvio SAS drives which are also in the 2.5" form factor, but these are fairly expensive.

http://www.seagate.com/files/static...enterprise/savvio/Savvio 15K.2/100516230d.pdf

Another option if cost is an issue for the amount of storage needed is to use 1TB 2.5" Velociraptors, but this is not recommended because they have to be removed from their 3.5" cradle and this will void the warranty, other than that they do spin at 10K RPM and supposedly do have the TLER feature enabled for hardware raid (double check this aspect if you are considering them) but extra cooling for them will also be an issue.

http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701282.pdf

Cheers.
 
Thank you all for your help!

Another part of the problem:
A RAID rebuild will be the kiss of death for this system and cause thousands of dollars worth of time during the rebuild. Is there any cards that have a battery in them so that when a system gets shut down (by holding down the power button) the RAID does not have to be rebuildt the next time the system is powered on? Right now I am have a UPS solution incase of a power outage but this does not cover if the system needs to be shutdown manually due to the OS freezing up.

Thanks again for the help everyone.
 
drescherjm said:
I would highly doubt that is the cause. And doesn't Intel call this a hw raid in raid 0 or 1. With that said I recommend LSI based SAS raid controllers.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the reccomendation. After talking with Segate they told me there should be no problem with their drives working in a RAID. I have been using two seperate pairs of the Segate Constellation.2 drives and both of the RAIDs seem to be rebuilding randomly (dropping a disk upon bootup).

Here is what happens.
-Booted up, both drives are working properly.
-Do a regular shutdown through Start>Shutdown
-Turn the system back on.
-The Intel Matrix Storage Manager shows up after the BIOS screen. It shows the status of the RAID to be NORMAL.
-Press Ctrl-I to enter the RAID manager.
-In the RAID manager it only shows 1 drive in the raid (Port1 -Slave) with a RAID Status : Degraded.
 
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