What raid card to get...

Easius

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 1, 2009
Messages
356
Looking to run RAID-5 on 3x300GB Raptor drives
I have pci/pci-e slots available for this.

Anyone have any suggestions? Price range looking for under 200$
 
If you don't mind buying used hardware with little or no warranty, you could buy a Dell Perc 5/i card off eBay for ~$100 or so plus two of these SFF-8484 to 4 x SATA Cables for ~$25. Thus, you get 8 ports and a true hardware RAID controller for around ~$125 or so. Add a battery backup unit for ~$40 and you're set in case of power outages as well up the performance. Not a bad deal considering that a new true PCI-E hardware RAID controller is around $300 (Areca ARC-1210) for 4 ports.

EDIT: As of May 2009, it seems that you can find many Perc 5/i cards with the BBU and PCI bracket for $120 and under. Excellent price!

But those Dell Perc 5/i cards are finicky about motherboards. It will take up PCI-E x16 slot if you don't have a PCI-E x8 slot.

Read these threads for more info:
Dell Perc 5/i RAID Card: Tips and Benchmarks
Finally went to a Hardware Raid5 controller...
Dell Perc 5/i - Mainboard Compatibility List
Solution for Dell Perc 5/i for Intel Chipsets
Add 8 device SAS/SATA 256MB BBU Enterprise class RAID card to your rig for about $100 w/ PERC 5i (LSI 8480E OEMed to Dell)
 
New parts are required, this system is being built for someone and being warranty'd for 3 years.

Using an ASUS p5bv-c series server board.

I have open slots of a Pci Express x16 slot (x8 link)

and an open Pci-express x8 slot (x4 link)

and 3 available standard PCI slots.

Will be used by a small company with about 20 users max accessing it at any time, not extreme use though. It's replacing a much older machine currently.

If it's worth paying the extra for a full hardware 4 port raid card, I am willing to do it. It's running Q9650.

I also have a couple 3ware cards that are a couple years old. They were about 400$ when I bought them but looking to keep this to new tech.
 
Raptor drives are not enterprise rated drives.. I am not sure I'd use them in RAID 5 for a business. If you need more performance than ES SATA consider SAS..

Really unless you have to build it yourself, a small Dell server is hard to beat price wise and you can get a 3 year 4 hour response time support contract from them..

Edit: A better idea for building yourself: Really rather than RAID 5, do RAID 10.. It takes one more drive, but gives you just about the same reliability with better performance and you don't need a mega dollar RAID controller.
 
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They wanted speed and a cheaper price, they didn't want super high end and super fast.

I compromised told them the differences and they decided, oh well. Still a huge improvement over what they are using now.

Open to more suggestions.
 
Thanks I'll definitely look into those 299$ offerings from areca. I was just trying to stay within budget but really for a better performer I don't care.
 
I love my arc-1220, but I felt a little confined with it so I bought an arc-1680ix-24.

On the 1220, I am seeing ~400MB/s on 8x7200.11 1TB drives in raid 5.
On the 1680, I am seeing ~200MB/s on 3xWD Black 1TB drives in raid 5.
 
The Perc5 isn't really picky about motherboards. You just need to tape off one pin on the connector. For under $150 you can't beat it.
 
Went with the areca-1210. Installed it today with the 3 raptors in raid 5, 64k striping. The sequential read speeds through HDtach were 225mbps and the burst was 725mbps.

Seems like a nice little card however the web interface on the 3wares is much nicer looking I like the features of the Areca.
 
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