What RAID controller do you have?

R

runLoganrun

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I had my sights sent on a nice areca hardware raid card, 8xsata II ports.
I can't afford that right now, so am looking at "soft" raid solutions.

For example, 2 cards I am looking at are:

RocketRaid 2220

and

RocketRaid 2320

purely based on what is available at newegg for 8x sata II port card, and customer ratings given. I'm not sure exactly what the diff is in these cards, except one is 4x pci-e, and one is 16x, I'll have to use a 16x slot anyway so that doesn't matter. Also all the other cards that I came up with on my search were of the hardware variety, and almost twice as expensive, and I'm sure better, but I'd rather build the case sooner than later so hoping one of these solutions will do fine (or any other suggestions anyone has to offer up).

Does anyone own one of these cards, or similar, that can elaborate a little?

General raid info:
if i understand this correctly, a hardware controller does all the calculations onboard, and is equipped w/ onboard memory, which (I think) enables faster rebuilds, and is more reliable, and easier to transfer to another system if need be. isn't it still configured and run with software though?
soft raid utilizes the pc's cpu to manage all the calculations and is therefore slower, in addition to causing a performance hit to cpu, not clear on relative reliability here though, if you have to reformat os hdd, does the array go with it, or do you just have to reinstall software and it picks up the array no prob? guess i'm not clear on interdependency of os and array for either solution.

Am I on track here with this?

It would seem that, despite (i believe) slower rebuild times, soft raid would be fine for a file server, where the cpu is not taxed very much anyway (not many users on network in my case, 2-3).

IDK why, but i feel biased towards a hardware raid solution, i guess because everything i read tells me so, but if i were to guess, i would say that there's probably quite a bit greater percentage of soft-raid users out there. So, i'm looking for some assurance (of soft-raid), or guidance on which solution is better for me. because i will hold out, if the spendy Areca, or other hard-raid card, is significantly better, but would like to spend less money if a soft-raid solution is comparable, reliability wise, and is as easy to migrate to another system.

any takers?

many thanks,
rlr

edit: one more thing.... many of these cards specify Vista compatibility, does that mean they'll work in Win7? thx
 
Last edited:
runLoganrun said:
General raid info:
if i understand this correctly, a hardware controller does all the calculations onboard, and is equipped w/ onboard memory, which (I think) enables faster rebuilds, and is more reliable, and easier to transfer to another system if need be. isn't it still configured and run with software though?
soft raid utilizes the pc's cpu to manage all the calculations and is therefore slower, in addition to causing a performance hit to cpu, not clear on relative reliability here though, if you have to reformat os hdd, does the array go with it, or do you just have to reinstall software and it picks up the array no prob? guess i'm not clear on interdependency of os and array for either solution.

Am I on track here with this?
Click to expand...

Hadware RAID controllers can be setup and managed by software installed on the OS but is usually setup before the OS boots by managing the card directly via its onboard management environment.

They also have the ability to use an onboard battery backup so if power is cut to your PC or you have a hardware issue with your PC where it turns off non-gracefully your array isn't hosed as the transaction info is store in the onboard cache and saved for ~3 days.

Most, if not all, HW RAID cards support OCE (online capacity expansion) and ORM (online RAID level migration) so you can expand or change the array non destructively.
 
If this is going to be a dedicated file server I'd go with a 'true' software RAID solution like FreeNAS or OpenFiler instead - or even WHS. Really not a fan of driver-level RAID, it's basically the worst of both worlds, but the Windows software RAID stack is pretty much unusable for anything other than mirroring.
 
Dude those arent very good solutions tbh. if you had a few more bucks i know where you could get a areca1680-ix for 450 *whisltes*:eek:
 
Whether or not you can reuse a software based RAID depends on how exactly you're setting up the software RAID array. As keenan noted, FreeNas and OpenFiler are "true" software RAID in the sense that the entire RAID array from setup to maintenance is done entirely within the OS. IIRC, if you set it up correctly, you can move the RAID array from one OS to another as long as the OSe's have the same kernel or family. The two Highpoint cards you chose are often called hardware assisted software RAID or fakeRAID where you use the card's onboard management environment to create and setup the RAID array but it uses the PC's onboard CPU to do all of the parity calculations. I would think that you would have a higher chance of the RAID array being picked up with the fakeRAID card since all of the setup info is on the card itself, not the OS.

As long as the OS drive is not on the card itself nor part of the RAID array, you should be able to reinstall the OS and still pick up either RAID setups.

Not sure which of the two software RAID options are reliable than the other. The advantages of a hardware RAID has already been said by danman.
 
The other + for hardware RAID is support. If you use drives on their HCL then you can call or write to the company if you have issues and expect help if needed.
 
danman said:
The other + for hardware RAID is support. If you use drives on their HCL then you can call or write to the company if you have issues and expect help if needed.
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for the replies,

Newegg now has an open-box Areca 4 port card that's pretty marked down, but what is a multi-adapter exactly? it says more capacity can be used with this. Is it for sata?
this card though the battery backup is seperate, and costlier than what I thought it would be, don't a lot of these cards come with the BBU on card?
alternatively what if I use the 4 port card for now, and were to add a 2nd 4 port card later, in the long run it would cost a little more, and would cost an extra drive for parity sake, having 2 separate arrays, it almost seems better though in some ways, if something were to happen on one array, it wouldn't affect the other, but also slightly more of a pita. Any thoughts on that?
lastly, and i did post this on another thread, sorry, but am getting different people replying here, so here goes: what is the deal with raid edition hard drives? I recently read that WD says there standard drives are unsuitable for use in raid, and on another forum some people confirmed this. I have a small collection of WD1001FALS drives I was planning on using for array, can i/ or should i not use them? That's a drag if no, I've been buying these drives for this purpose.... F it, maybe I'll just use WHS.....

Thanks a lot,
rlr
 
Adaptec RAID 31205 did look on ebay 350 $ 12 port
ADAPTEC ASR-31605 SATA/SAS ebay 400$ 16 port
areca on ebay to ok price to.


Adaptec raid cards lot better then software raid.
 
agrophel said:
Adaptec RAID 31205 did look on ebay 350 $ 12 port
ADAPTEC ASR-31605 SATA/SAS ebay 400$ 16 port
areca on ebay to ok price to.


Adaptec raid cards lot better then software raid.
Click to expand...

Those adaptec cards suck.
 
runLoganrun said:
I had my sights sent on a nice areca hardware raid card, 8xsata II ports.
I can't afford that right now, so am looking at "soft" raid solutions.

For example, 2 cards I am looking at are:

RocketRaid 2220

and

RocketRaid 2320

purely based on what is available at newegg for 8x sata II port card, and customer ratings given. I'm not sure exactly what the diff is in these cards, except one is 4x pci-e, and one is 16x,
Click to expand...

FYI (or anyone else reading this thread):

The 2220 is a PCI-X card, not PCI-e. It's a nice card, I have bought 2 of them, but unless you have a PCI-X motherboard you'll have to use it in a standard PCI slot at limited speeds.
 
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