Sata Raid 5 Controller

[tech]

Hi there in just thinking of buying 3 x 320 gig Sata hdd and also a Raid 5 Controller, so this way I will have 640gig of Reduant space,

Does anyone know which is the best Raid 5 Sata controller to use?

[ripken204]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....rice=&maxPrice=

how much do u wna pay? heres a huge list.

[Aegis]

RAID5 capable cards cost a lot. Expect to spend at least $150:

(SATA1)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816115023

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816115020

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816118015

(SATA2)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816115027

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816102077

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?...N82E16816115025

[allen2]

To my knowledge, AMCC 3ware 9550 and 9500 serie are the best for performance but also the most expensive. They come with 3 years waranty and AMCC offer some interesting feature like advanced replacement.

[puntoMX]

You would not use indeed a cheap as* RAID controller to rebuild your setup when you have 2x 320GB; you will need some intelligence to do rebuild your setup fast or wait "a long time".

[JuMz]

You would not use indeed a cheap as* RAID controller to rebuild your setup when you have 2x 320GB; you will need some intelligence to do rebuild your setup fast or wait "a long time".

How long is "a long time."?? I am in a very similar situation. Right now, I have 4 WD320's in RAID 0 which I obviously want to change to RAID 5 (or 6?). How long (estimated) does it take to rebuild incase 1 drive fails?

Edited May 12, 2006 by JuMz

[puntoMX]

I don´t know, depends on a lot of factors but for 600GB I think like 6 hours or so.

Any one else tried it with some normal SATA drives in RAID5?

[Aegis]

I just stick with the onboard controller. And even then, I never go toward RAID5 or any other redundant setup. Drives rarely fail anyway; I've had 6 computers since 1997 and not one of them has failed yet.

[allen2]

It took 5hours to rebuild an raid 5 array of 1.8To with 7*300Go drives and a 3ware 7506-8 (ata133).

[-I-]

true, but 3disk is triple the chance

i had softwware version of raid 5 setup in ata100 5400 rpm and had to wait 3q of an hour for restoring + windows error checking an aray of 5 9gb disk (35gb) so (probably 1min per gb)

but that was a looong time ago,

i think allen has a good guideline for the little more expansive versions,

btw allen could you tell what yours has costed you?

[tech]

i think Raid 5 is the best way to go I have loads of Tunes I dont want to loose I recently lost a 100gig disk, lucky enough i had a frined over a few week before and he ghosted the entire disk, If he hadnt called I would be down 100 gigs of tunes I have over 300 gigs at present of Music loads of Apps, Image Files from PC's I work in IT and also have loads of DATA

[allen2]

I have one 3ware 7506-8 and one 9500S-8.

The 7506 cost about 400$ but you can find sometimes one on e-bay cheaper.

The 9500S one is more expensive and cost about 650$, i got this one e-bay and paid a lot less.

Anyway, i tried promise TX2000 (raid 0/1 hardware), LSI Megaraid IDE (up to 8 drives raid0/1/5/10) and lastest adaptec sata raid controllers (for HP proliant servers); most of them do their job but if you are looking for the performance with raid (at least 75% of perf of a standalone drive), you'll go for a 3ware or an adaptec:

- LSI Megaraid could only deliver 10MByte/s in raid 5 configuration with either Windows or Linux.

- Promise TX2000 can deliver at most 45MBytes/s in raid 1 configuration with either Windows or Linux and is tricky to get working with linux.

- Adpatec SATA 21160 in raid 5 configuration deliver something like 20/25Mbytes/s with Linux i didn't tried with Windows.

- 3ware7506 deliver 30/40Mbytes/s in raid 5 configuration with linux and 25/35Mbytes/s with Windows.

- 3ware 9500S deliver 30/60Mbytes in raid 5 configuration with Windows.

My choice of 3ware's controllers was made because i needed a good Windows and linux support and 3ware controller have been supported natively in linux kernels for long time (no need to patch or to load a lousy module without sources).

I won't tell someone to absolutely buy a 3ware controller if he don't want a hardware raid5 and good perf. Sadly theese controllers are very expensive.

[tech]

has anyone every used one of these

Sil3114 SATA Serial ATA 5 Port (4+1) Raid Card upto 4HD

[Aegis]

Unless I'm mistaken, aren't those chips integrated into most motherboards?

[JuMz]

You are correct. Perhaps they come in a standalone card as well?