Which 8 port PCI-E Raid Controller?

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Sunin

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - August 2008
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I'm in the market for a little project and want to make an 8 drive raid 5 setup well under $500 is desired. Has to be hardware controlled raid, not software. PCI-E, Compatible with WinXP, low profile is good not a must. I'm thinking of sticking it in the PCI-E slot between my 2 GTX's on what will soon be a 780i mobo. I will be connecting 8 40mb/s drives to the controller, but would like SATA II compatibility for future setups.

Looks like the following players
1. Adaptec
2. Promise
3. Highpoint
4. LSI
5. Areca

I am tossing around the following cards:

http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/raid_tech/sas_drives/SAS-3805/
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131004
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115043

Any other good options out there? Also do I need to provide any more information?

Thanks for the help!
 
After using an Areca card for a while, I wouldn't want anything less. There is a reason that all the people on the forum with large RAID arrays (20TB+) use their cards. I would see how picky your motherboard is when it comes to putting stuff other than video cards in the PCIe slots before you buy one first.
 
considering I have nothing else to try on the mobo if the PCI-E allows anythign but video I may just end up having to go for one of these cards and try it. I can always return it if it don't work.

Along with your review I read about 100 other reviews and besides the initial firmware update, most people have had excellent experiences with the card. I look forward to my first dive into raids.

I have 8 Compact flash to Sata Converters on their way and 8 266x 4gig compact flash cards which can read at 40MB/s. I figured 8 should get me nearly 300MB/s throughput. Mainly for games to enhance load times and such. I won't be utilizing it for much besides reading and only intial installs of games. If I calculated right that will ned me about 24gig of storage and should be about 3-4 times faster than any SSD out there (obvioulsy not as durable for extensive writes), but for a gaming computer it should work well.
 
Sounds like a good idea... how much are the converters? Thinking with 500 gig hard drives hitting low 90's high 80's $ might be worth just getting 8 of those drives. Although the seek times would probably blow for games so CF is probably the way to go.

I have the Areca 1230 and the card has performed by far better than the Perc 4 and 5 cards we have on our servers running SCSI drives. I have yet to have a drive die so we'll see how that experiance goes when the time comes, but i know we have a drive die about 2 twice a year and work and the software is iffy,and had to boot into the bios to restore the array. Freakin server was offline for the whole day, just unacceptable, i tried to do what it shoudl do in software and it wouldn't let me called them up and told me i had to go into the bios for that, was gay.

Anyway my vote is on Areca. Post some benchmarks once you get it.
 
Yeah I got the 1230. I figure down the road when SSD's get FASTER, read 300mb/s by themselves I can always strip them or raid them with this controller and see 600mb/s or higher on a future gaming system. So will be an interesting project. 8 converters ran me $30.40 each.

8 266x CF Cards $44/each
8 CF to Sata II converters $31/each
Raid Card $440

Total cost: $1040

Kinda ouch, but ah well I can always use the Raid card for future projects.

What benchmarking tools would you suggest?
 
From personal experience, I don't think those compact flash cards will hold up for very long. Those things aren't meant for the kind of writing an operating system does, but rather camera's and PDA's, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these cards don't start failing after 2-3months of usage. Just my two cents...
 
I'm using an LSI MegaRAID 8308ELP. The only thing I don't like about it is that it is passively cooled. It hasn't been a problem but it does run hot.
 
oplin said:
Sounds like a good idea... how much are the converters? Thinking with 500 gig hard drives hitting low 90's high 80's $ might be worth just getting 8 of those drives. Although the seek times would probably blow for games so CF is probably the way to go.

I have the Areca 1230 and the card has performed by far better than the Perc 4 and 5 cards we have on our servers running SCSI drives. I have yet to have a drive die so we'll see how that experiance goes when the time comes, but i know we have a drive die about 2 twice a year and work and the software is iffy,and had to boot into the bios to restore the array. Freakin server was offline for the whole day, just unacceptable, i tried to do what it shoudl do in software and it wouldn't let me called them up and told me i had to go into the bios for that, was gay.

Anyway my vote is on Areca. Post some benchmarks once you get it.
Click to expand...
Having lost a drive already, I can tell you that downtime is the last thing you will be experiencing. Just pull the old drive, put in the new, and start rebuilding the array. You can use it while the array is being rebuilt. Same goes for the online capacity expansion. Add more drives and immediately use them. If you get the 12 port or larger cards (what I have), you also get out-of-band management, which I also wouldn't want to give up. I can screw around with the card while Windows is booting. Better yet, I have my card send me text messages on my phone when something goes wrong.
 
The Areca cards are good performers for sure but for the money the Perc 5/i is a damn nice card for a home server who doesn't need the increased write performance of the Areca.

as always ymmv but spending a grand on an Areca versus 100 dollars on a Perc 5/i which is still IOP333 based is something to consider, personally i'd rather (and have) put that money toward more drives.
 
The Areca I got the 1220 was 439.99. I know I won't ever use more than 8 drives with it.
 
One reason I would recommend the HighPoint RocketRAID3320 the op posted is because cable management would be simpler.
 
the 3320 uses the cpu and ram to calculate the parity. it is only hardware assisted so while a server or media center environment are suitable some systems may need the cycles.

i am in the market for a 16 channel. between the arc-1261ml and megaraid 84016e i am working out if the $400 extra will suit my needs. for me i narrowed y options to areca and lsi.
 
I was looking at this one as well:

areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card RAID level 0, 1, 1E, 3, 5, 6 (if RAID 6 engine supported) and JBOD - Retail

Currently $434.99

Sunin --- do you like it?

How does your system with the 8 CF's work? I mean, well... do you like it? Is it freaking fast?

:D



 
I did not complete this project due to lack of smart monitoring on the CF's. I have to wait on SD's to do the full raid thing and that is off a bit. I expect my nehalem build will have two to four 32 or 64gb SD's for gaming. For now nothing going on.

 
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