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which raid 5 controller?

D

ddoud

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 21, 2004
Messages
200
Hi,

I'm trying to design a good raid 5 system for data storage on my network, but I need some help choosing the controller and the drives.

The host system (dedicated):
What I've got:
AMD Athlon xp 1500 (or thereabouts)
Abit MAX II AT7 board
256mb ddr ram (512?) Would that matter?
40gb system drive with fedora core 4

What I need:
Controller: pci, raid-5-able, growable arrays?
drives: western digital 250's? whatever cool deal is avail (like the outpost one today for a 200gb at $70)
Powersupply?

I'm thinking of the highpoint 454 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816115016 ) because it allows up to 8 pata drives to be connected, but I'd like to be able to grow the array later on and I dont see any cards that can do that. Is the grow technology only reserved for more expensive cards?

Also, what drives would you use? On newegg the pricepoint seems to be the WesternDigital 250's. I've no problems with WD, and they have a 3 year warrenty so thats a plus.

EDIT:
I have a dual pII 333 system with 512mb of ram if dually's are better for this type of thing, or if proc speed doesnt really matter....

Thanks in advance for any help,
-Dustin
 
Any reason you are not going SATA? The drives are really not that much anymore and sata will certainly give you more options in the future when it comes to upgrading the array.
 
Thanks I'll check out 3ware.

The only reason I'm not thinking sata is because when I browsed newegg, the 8 channel sata cards were way more than the $90 pata card with 4 channels (but up to 8 drives).

Other than that, nothing is keeping me stuck to anything except for cost. If theres a reasonably priced 6-8 channel raid 5 card that can grow the array for a little more, I'd get that. I just dont want to max out my 4 channel sata raid with only 3 drives working for my raid 5.

What about the host system? It should be fine right?

-D
 
RAID-5 performance on a PATA host with master and slave drive on the same cable will be abyssmal. There is absolutely no reason to use PATA for a RAID setup of more than 4 drives. SATA is a much better choice, and worth spending extra cash on.
 
Hey thanks. Thats the sort of think I need to know.

Abyssmal huh? I'll just be using it for storage, but I guess I'd like it to be as fast as it can be.

I checked the 8 port sata 3ware cards, but they're like $500 smacks. Say I got a 4 port one - can you add raid cards and have them be part of the same array?

Sorry if thats dumb, the last raid I had was zero on my iwill k266 board. Hah.

For raid 5 though, I was thinking that the minimum investment to see the benefits of raid 5 would be 4-6 drives. No sense in having a parity drive when its only one in three right?
 
Highpoint makes some decent Raid5 SATA cards that don't cost a fortune. They can also be found at Newegg.
 
I'm checkin out the highpoints, but I found a small problem:

Most of the 8 port cards use 64 bit 66mhz slots. My tiger MP only has a 33mhz slot. I might be stuck using a 4 port one then, cause I'm not gonna upgrade the board.

I could always wait for the larger drives to come out and bring the cost/gb down.

-D
 
I have the HighPoint RocketRAID 464, it's a step up running a 1.09TB array (8 drives) and it works great.

I went with the RR 464 mainly for it's price, but it's doing a fairly good job. I'm not too concerned about speed, it's mostly just archive, and I have all my data in two seperate locations as well. The other reason is I already owned a few IDE drives I'd bought, and didn't want to lose the money, so I just picked up a few more drives (figured if I spent the money I did on them, I'd use them). Works great.

My next array will be SATA though, but if you're looking for just basic storage, nothing too fancy - it's not that bad of a card.
 
fibroptikl-

Have you ever run sandra on your system to gauge its performance? What type of raid are you runnin? Is this your main system, or are you mounting the drive with samba or something?

Thanks for any info.

The card is cheap, but it looks like I can get a 8port sata from newegg for a little less than double.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102051

It looks like the only cards than can do array growing weigh in at the low 200s...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102035
 
ddoud said:
fibroptikl-

Have you ever run sandra on your system to gauge its performance? What type of raid are you runnin? Is this your main system, or are you mounting the drive with samba or something?

Thanks for any info.

The card is cheap, but it looks like I can get a 8port sata from newegg for a little less than double.
Click to expand...
No, I have never run SiSoft Sandra before to guage it's performance - it's pretty good for what I'm using it for. And I've never had a reason to. It's a RAID5, and it's a file server. It's just one large drive. I've got it mapped from my PC to the file server.

True, I'd probably have went with SATA; but this is just for storage and streaming mp3's - we're not talking a 400GB SQL database here with 120 concurrent users. It runs on a P3 650, 512MB RAM, 80GB Western Digital 8MB drive, and runs Windows 2003 Server.
 
Thanks for the info, thats a good point.

The most my raid would ever be doing is a file copy and streaming a movie, or that sort of thing, so the 4 channel with 8 drives wont prolly matter.

-D
 
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