cheapest raid 1 card?

[seversphere]

would have two 80gig WD 8mb cache ata100 or ata133 on the card for redundancy. What's cheapest or where to buy decent ones. I would need 5 of em.

[CaffeineMe]

Get a Promise Controller, off Ebay and hack it. Adding a single resistor between a couple easily ID'd portions of the card , then flashing it's BIOS turns it into their more expensive RAID card. I bought a controller off Ebay a year ago for about $15, but I've never actually done the hack. Google Promise Raid Hack and see what you find.

[seversphere]

haha wrong section

thanx for the tip

[Spinner]

http://www.short-media.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2464

Just in case there is anything in there that might help you out.:)

Cheers

[Tex]

CaffeineMe said
Get a Promise Controller, off Ebay and hack it. Adding a single resistor between a couple easily ID'd portions of the card , then flashing it's BIOS turns it into their more expensive RAID card. I bought a controller off Ebay a year ago for about $15, but I've never actually done the hack. Google Promise Raid Hack and see what you find.

You can get the raid card for 15 bucks if your patient with no hacking required on eBay.

And (not to the guy I quoted) why exactly do you want to run raid-1 anyway? Please please run raid-0 or no raid and backup instead. Raid-1 guards one of about 20 things you need a backup for and is essential for companies running 24/7 that can not afford downtime. IS that you? You might also be very careful concerning how many of the cards will run together in the same box. And with 5 your gonna be sharing IRQ's. And the cheap cards are basicaly software raid which uses the cpu and system resources to raid them so disk activity with 5 cards and sharing irq's etc... can seriously impact performance too.

Hopefully you need five cards for 5 seperate systems. And trust someone who has done this.... And done it also with real controllers not these toys. raid-1 saves a buisness runing 24/7 that can not afford to even go down long enough to restore from a backup or disk image but it STILL has to be backed up anyway so don't think this is a way not to backup. You may know all this but 80 percent of the folks trying to do what your asking about seem to think raid-1 allowed them to not backup and thats simply not the case.

You can image a drive and restore it in an hour probably and its a valid BACKUP that will hold the file you just deleted or screwed up by mistake. With a mirror your screwed as its gone from BOTH disks in the blink of an eye. Raid-1 is not a excuse not to backup. It saves you from only a primary disk failure. you still need to backup.

Tex

[seversphere]

it was for 5 separate machines. The raid-1 is for uptime and the boss will backup whatever he needs I'm sure as that liability is not on my shoulders :D

Performance isn't a factor so I went with onboard raid. The reason I was looking for the add-on card type was initially I was going to get all-in-one mobo and add raid but pricing changed things up a bit. Bought those 10 Western Digital 80gig 8mb cache for the 3 year warranty. They needed cheap but have all these critical requirements so 5 machines ended up being $2400. With ram still pricey I think that's pretty good for 5 raid machines.

Thanx for all the help guys.