SATA Raid card needed for JBOD? Which?

[Gutspiller]

I am planning on creating a backup server and am going to be doing JBOD with two 1TB drives. Which is a good sata raid card that will be reliable?

I have a spare P5W DH Deluxe mobo around and am wondering if using this mobo is OK for a web backup server? I don't want the server to be limited or be unreliable because I used this mobo, but I don't want to spend extra money on a mobo if I don't have to.

If there's a card that can do other decent raid configurations, and supports JBOD on the side, in case latter on I need some sort of actual raid, then I would be tempted to go with that card, perhaps this is a given for "raid cards" in general though, I'm not sure?

Recommendations and suggestions please.

 

[djBon2112]

I'd just use the software RAID on the mobo or a Linux RAID. Anything more is complete overkill for a 2 drive JBOD.

 

[Ockie]

Why not just plug the two drives straight into the motherboard? You can create a spanned volume and have one logical volume for both drives (ie 2tb drive).

This avoids the need of needing to purchase extra hardware.

 

[Gutspiller]

I'd just use the software RAID on the mobo or a Linux RAID. Anything more is complete overkill for a 2 drive JBOD.

I don't believe the P5W DH Deluxe mobo supports raid, and I am only starting at 2TB, but want a setup that is built to be ready to quickly be downed and have more drives thrown in and brought back up quickly. From what I can tell, even if this mobo has raid, it can only do it with 2 drives.

What is a decent sata raid card for this? I am looking for something that hopefully has MORE THAN 4 connections on it if it doesn't cost much more.

 

[Dangman]

I don't believe the P5W DH Deluxe mobo supports raid, and I am only starting at 2TB, but want a setup that is built to be ready to quickly be downed and have more drives thrown in and brought back up quickly. From what I can tell, even if this mobo has raid, it can only do it with 2 drives.

Software RAID or Linux RAID doesn't require that the motherboard support RAID since the entire RAID setup is done by the OS, not the motherboard.

Also, your motherboard DOES support RAID since it has two different fakeRAID chips on it. It can support up to 3 drives in RAID 5 on the ICH7R chip and up to two drives in RAID 0/1 on the SIL4723 chip. Though none of the onboard RAID chips on that motherboard support JBOD or OCE, or Online Capacity Expansion, which allows you to expand the RAID array without losing your data.

And as Ockie said, why not use plug the drives into the motherboard itself and create a spanned volume and have one logical volume for both drives? You can do this with Logical Volume Management if you're using Linux or Dynamic disks in Windows XP IIRC.

 

[Ockie]

I have the feeling that the OP is confused between real raid disk redundancy and JBOD

 

[Gutspiller]

Software RAID or Linux RAID doesn't require that the motherboard support RAID since the entire RAID setup is done by the OS, not the motherboard.

Also, your motherboard DOES support RAID since it has two different fakeRAID chips on it. It can support up to 3 drives in RAID 5 on the ICH7R chip and up to two drives in RAID 0/1 on the SIL4723 chip. Though none of the onboard RAID chips on that motherboard support JBOD or OCE, or Online Capacity Expansion, which allows you to expand the RAID array without losing your data.

And as Ockie said, why not use plug the drives into the motherboard itself and create a spanned volume and have one logical volume for both drives? You can do this with Logical Volume Management if you're using Linux or Dynamic disks in Windows XP IIRC.

So if I use this "Logical Volume Management" I can use the mobo I mentioned, not have to buy a raid card, can use all 4 sata ports on the mobo, and I can throw in more drives without having to redo the system?

Because I am new to all this (can ya tell ) I want it so once it's setup if I need more space, I don't have to set it up all over again, I simply want to add another drive to the server and it automatically has that new space to use.

Is the above true about "Logical Volume Management" or do you have any recommendations?

I have the feeling that the OP is confused between real raid disk redundancy and JBOD

I think he is very confused about what he is talking about.

 

[Dangman]

So if I use this "Logical Volume Management" I can use the mobo I mentioned, not have to buy a raid card, can use all 4 sata ports on the mobo, and I can throw in more drives without having to redo the system?

Everything up until the redoing the system is true about LVM. That last part is possible but I haven't thrown more drives into a LVM volume group....yet. So can't vouch for that.

Exactly what will you be backing up on this server? You said web backup but that could mean any number of things.

You might want to check out Windows Home Server. It's easier to setup than LVM with Linux and you can always add more drives without having to redo the entire system. Some more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Home_Server

 

[Gutspiller]

It's been recommended to have the backup server the same OS as the web server we're backing up, which is Cent OS. This has been recommended due to the way Linux handles capable letters in filenames and Windows based OSes don't "see" the difference.

This server is going to be at my location, while my web servers are hosted at another. This backup server is going to be receiving or grabbing daily, weekly, and monthly backups of website content on all 3 of our web servers. Our host is going to help us with exporting mysql data on the web servers to files to be backed up.

So in case anything happens to our web servers we have a backup.

We are trying to do this ourselves since we have a fiber line already that isn't being used to it's full speed and we are currently paying our host $100 a month to provide a backup of these web servers. So we are hoping that after this is all built we will be saving $100 a month and when the "backup server" needs more space, we just add more drives.

The adding more drives without having to reconfigure anything is a very big deal since we don't really know exactly what we're doing and once we're all setup the first time, we want to keep it that way since backups will already be setup.

Our host recommended RAID5 or RAID10, which we don't really see a need as the bandwidth would be a bottleneck anyways.

Any suggestions and recommendations are very much appreciated as we are still very early in the learn stage of this whole process.

Thanks for any advice!