simple 8-port sata raid controller

[trulala]

hello

since my onboard intel sata controller is full (6x 2TB), i need to buy a raid controller card. I have space for 8 more disks in my tower.
I only need Raid 1, not even raid 10. Performance is not essential, but i don't want the controller to brake the disks performance. The disks are accessed mainly over gigabit ethernet. I use WD 2TB Green disks.

At the moment I have 2 PCI slots and 1 PCI express x4 (the long version; physically a x16 card fits) available.

Now I have two options:

1) buying a 8-port sata2 controller for the pci express slot.

With this solution i could go for a real hardware raid controller, since they are in the same price range as a 8-port fakeraid card like the highpoint 2320.
a) LSI MegaRaid 9211-8i
b) Adaptec Raid 2805

Unfortunately both are specified as x8 pci express cards. Since i only use raid 1, my x4 slot will certailny not be a bottleneck, but i'm not sure if both cards will actually work in a x4 slot. The LSI one should work, according to a few people on the net.. didn't find a lot of info about the adaptec one.

2) just buy 2 cheap 4-port PCI fakeraid cards for 50 euros each.
The WD green disks should be below the PCI bottleneck. But who knows, maybe in 2 years the 4TB drives will be a lot faster. And what about those fakeraid cards.. is it good enough for raid1? I don't mind if the cpu has to work a little bit, it's idling anyway

could someone help me with my choice?

thank you

 

[Zerosum]

Think most people would say avoid PCI raid cards because of the speed. 2 drives could saturate the PCI bus and it's shared among all other devices. You'll have all 8 drives sharing that bandwidth then.

Instead of 2 cheap cards, can always take a look at like the AOC-SASLP-MV8. It'll support 8 drives and it'll probably be about the same price as the 2 cards you were looking at. Don't know the euro cost but they can be found for ~$100USD or a little bit more here. It fits your 'simple 8 port raid' but it's not hardware tho.

 

[sub.mesa]

PCI RAID cards are very unreliable; never buy them! They use crap chipsets like Silicon Image SiI-3112/3114 and Promise FastTrak TX150.

Note that an 8-disk RAID1 would give you the capacity of a single disk; thus 8x 2TB would give you 2TB of storage. Are you sure that is what you want? I believe you want RAID0+1 or 1+0, meaning you have 8TB storage capacity with 8x2TB disks (half of the raw 16TB).

You could also consider LSI based chips, such as SuperMicro USAS-L8i. That one is very cheap and works great. PCI-express x8 or x16 will work on x1,x4 or x8 slots, if it fits physically. If not you can buy a riser, which transforms your x4 slot into a x16 slot (which also fits x8 cards). Of course, the speed will still be limited to x4. Some PCI-express slots on your motherboard have an open end, meaning you can insert oversized cards without any other requirements.

I do not recommend the MV8, it's a card with many bugs, issues and design flaws. I'd recommend to avoid it; plenty of good working cards as alternative. Intel SASUC8I, for example:
http://www.intel.com/products/server/raid-controllers/SASUC8I/SASUC8I-overview.htm

Note that for most hardware RAID you need expensive RAID edition harddrives, which can enable TLER/CCTL. A much cheaper, more reliable and faster alternative would be a NAS; no license cost, no controller, no RAID edition harddrives, cheap system hardware and if you opt for ZFS significantly added reliability due to checksums and self-healing capabilities.

 

[sub.mesa]

Also note: if you do not have a backup, and this is for home storage, then a RAID1 might not be your best choice. Either a good RAID5 + backup or a RAID0 + good backup would be preferred, over a single RAID1.

Remember: having a real backup is vastly superior to redundancy alone. Hence the saying "RAID is not a backup".

 

[FireWire2]

Now I have two options:

1) buying a 8-port sata2 controller for the pci express slot...

2) just buy 2 cheap 4-port PCI fakeraid cards for 50 euros each...

thank you

Not quite. About six months ago, that was your option...

Jmicron has a hadrware raid5 five drive (driver-less) solution. It needs a SATA
In your case remove a 2TB hdd, connect that SATA port to this controller you can see a raid volume as big as 8.0TB (2x2.0TB raid5), without messing with driver

Worst case you can bring the whole raid to ANY system with SATA port to access your data

I think this the BEST home usage raid/storage

**

 

[Priddle]

Not quite. About six months ago, that was your option...

Jmicron has a hadrware raid5 five drive (driver-less) solution. It needs a SATA
In your case remove a 2TB hdd, connect that SATA port to this controller you can see a raid volume as big as 8.0TB (2x2.0TB raid5), without messing with driver

Worst case you can bring the whole raid to ANY system with SATA port to access your data

I think this the BEST home usage raid/storage

**

Thanks for posting that. I've been searching for a RAID controller for weeks and this seems promising.