RAID options.. Who makes the best setup? (1 Viewer)

[Brett DiMichele]

I am not seriously considering RAID yet.... I have a 60GB

and a 1.6 GB and a 1.0GB that I can swap back and fourth

for now (and I am only using about 3 gigs of the 60GB)

But I was wondering who makes the best add on RAID cards?

I did a search on Ebay and didn't see much in the way of

add on RAID's and what I saw was pricey. My MoBo is not

setup for RAID just 2 Channel IDE

 

[Masood Ali]

For IDE RAID, Promise makes great RAID controllers. A runner up would be Highpoint.
Promise ATA133 RAID Card
Highpoint ATA133 RAID Card

 

[Jon_R]

There was a hack about a year ago that could turn a dma100 card into a RAID controller. My buddy and I did it on his and he has an 80 gig raid array that has been up and running ever since.

All it involves is soldering 1 10k resistor on to the board, its really really simple, and then flashing the bios of the card to be a RAID card. Promise makes both the external dma controllers and RAID cards. In fact, Promise makes most of the external cards you will see in retail stores, even if they don't say promise. Like at Walmart, they sometimes have a controller there, its a the same one as the Promise controller.

I'd give that a shot. If it didn't work you'd be out a few bucks as the controller is under $20. At least it used to be.

Jon

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Other manufacturers would be Link Removed (a heavy hitter when it comes to disk controller cards if there ever was one) and Link Removed
Adaptec does both the traditional SCSI RAID stuff as well as IDE RAID nowadays.

 

[Brett DiMichele]

Thanks for the tips all..

I think when and if I do decide to go RAID I will just pick

up a Promise RAID Controller.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

I'm on the fence myself... 3ware or Promise.

The 3ware Escalade cards and a 3-disk hotswap drive cage would be a great way to get started on a RAID 5 system for humane amounts of money.

Not that interested in striping or mirroring; one is unsafe and the other wastes hard drive space... and I don't need the speed boost from the striping for anything at the moment.

 

[Christopher Collins]

What exactly are you wanting to do with raid?

If you are looking for capacity raid is pretty worthless. I would only use raid when speed or data integrity were of prime importance.

IDE raid is not that great unless you spend some extra money and get the cards which have some cache onboard. The cache and processor on the controller card is what makes raid shine.

 

[Roy C.]

I really don't think RAID is explained properly. There are 4 or 5 different types of RAID and some are a huge improvement over others. Speed is relative to what you have installed on your PC and capacity has really nothing to do with it. It has all to do with how many drives you have and how you want to accomplish the task. If you're running NT, 2000, or XP, you should be able to do software RAID or even work with an extended volume set which will give you more capacity, granted with no redundacy. RAID can do this for you on a hardware level and can work just as well, and on some upper end controllers with 256MB cache, it flies. RAID is a great solution is you want speed, data integrity and some redundancy, which is limited with IDE drives for hot swapping and spare drives but it still beats master/slave stuff. Anyway, enough rambling.

My thoughts only,

Roy C.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Actually, both Promise and 3ware have hot-swap solutions available for IDE too now.

3ware's solution has the edge on Promise IMHO since they squeeze in three drives in a 2x5.25inch slot space. Promise's solution is one drive cage per 5.25 slot on the PC.

I'm assuming both solutions do what they are supposed to, ie let you hotswap drives...

 

[Roy C.]

That's great!! The only thing now left for IDE is to come out with hot-swappable hard drives and there would be no big difference between SCSI and IDE. Do those IDE RAID controller cards come with cache?? I've been out of IDE for a while and have not kept up too well with the technology.

Thanks,

Roy C.

 

[Brett DiMichele]

From what I saw of the promise card it looks like it has

Cache to me.. I would have to go back and read the specs

but it sure looked like it had ram chips on the card.

 

[Roy C.]

Brett,

as far as I could see and read, only one of the Promise cards has cache. I think it was the SuperTrak 6000. High-Point doesn't even make one.

Good luck,

Roy C.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Here's a decent link to explaining the different flavors of RAID.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Uh... In one message I point out that you can already hot swap IDE drives, and in the next Roy C points out it would be great if you could hot swap IDE drives?
Am I losing it or is he?
The higher end cards from Promise, 3ware and Adaptec - the ones capable of RAID5 - all have CPU's and cache on them, up to 128MB I think. The el cheapo ones for RAID0 and 1 only often don't.

 

[Roy C.]

Kimmo,

what I said was basically that I didn't think there are any IDE drives that are hot-swappable. I can read as well as you can, that some of the IDE RAID controllers support hot-swapping drives but .... whatever. All my servers use hot-swappable drives and they are different from non-hot-swap drives, be it in the cache or the power requirements. Unless IDE handles the disconnects and reconnects from data and power differently from SCSI I would think you'd still need specific drives to allow this.

Well, I just found out that Promise does support hot-swapping but only with an optional Promise SuperSwap 1000 removable drive chassis. This would explain the power and disconnect questions I had. There you go.

Later,

Roy C.