Simple RAID card.

J

jadams

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Mar 14, 2010
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Right now I'm using on board RAID on an MSI board. Its fine. I don't care if its "software" based and the CPU handles the load of parity.

What I'm looking for is a RAID card that has some type of management program that will let me know when/if a drive fails. I see the cheapo software RAID cards on newegg, and like I said, the software based doesn't bother me. I just need a way to monitor.
 
You forgot to tell us your current RAID vendor; Intel onboard RAID? If so you can monitor with Intel's own utility.

I'm not aware of JMicron, Silicon Image or Promise having utilities to manage their arrays; their drivers are very basic and not of high quality.

I would say, whenever your array is inaccessible that tells you there is something wrong with the array. Do you have a full backup in case that happens? You should consider windows software RAIDs to be unreliable or unpredictable at best. If you have no backup then i would highly advise to consider using one; or it will just be a matter of time before your first dataloss occurs.
 
You're right. I had a drive fail and the only reason i knew about it was because it was acting sluggish. Either that or when I reboot it, which it rarely gets rebooted and if it does there isnt even a monitor hooked up to it to read the status screen during bootup.

As far as backup, I do have a small backup for the very important things. But the majority of the other data, probably 75%, I can get back fairly easy and the RAID offers sufficient enough redundancy. Its just that having and managing and powering another physical box to back up this stuff just isnt feasible when I could probably get all back within a month or so. But obviously I would like to avoid this scenario if possible which is why I'm looking for a cheap card that will notify me when a drive fails.

Intel onboard RAID? It's possible and honestly I'm not sure. But I'll check when I get home today the model of the motherboard. Cant remember off the top of my head.
 
There has to be someone who can recommend a card for me with the requirements in the first post.
 
Could pick up a Dell Perc5/i with BBU for 125 bucks.
Its a real hardware raid card w/ cached and supports 8 drives
 
From my forum lurking, it seems that people recommend perc5 for an inexpensive hardware raid even though you said software would suffice for you.

Though I don't know what is gained by going with these $800 cards except more drives support and expansions.
 
Especially if you are going to do RAID5, a writeback implementation with BBU would be alot better; assuming you have TLER-capable drives.

The only onboard RAID that does RAID5 writeback is Intel and its writeback is in RAM and thus unprotected. So the low-end hardware RAID5 might actually be a good option if you want RAID5 on windows without going < 10MB/s write speeds or using bad implementations. I would avoid onboard RAID5 when possible. RAID0 and 1 is another story.
 
I have a Perc 5/i w/ BBU if you're interested. I decided to go with FreeBSD/ZFS instead, so it's just laying around.
 
If you opt for ZFS, then you do not want a RAID controller but rather a normal SATA controller or "HBA". These can be your onboard ports or any PCI-express add-on controller that allows non-RAID operation.

With ZFS on hardware RAID, you would still need TLER-capable disks and many cool features of ZFS will go unused. ZFS does RAID smarter than any conventional RAID driver (without the filesystem part) can ever do, theoretically. ZFS is great because it's both filesystem and RAID in one, which yields emerging properties.

I use the SuperMicro USAS-L8i PCI-express x8 controllers; 2x mini-SAS gives you 8 SATA/300 ports; you can just connect any SATA HDD/SSD to them. It's fairly cheap at $125 or so i think. Due to its UIO design you do need to remove the bracket to make it fit. The Intel SASUC8i is virtually the same but without those issues; it fits normal casings without having to remove the metal bracket.
 
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