Which RAID controller?

AuthorityActionAuthorityAction Missouri Member
edited February 2004 in Hardware
I'm going to ask for a raid controller this Christmas. It will have 2 120 gig WD IDE HDD. I want to run it in raid 0 or 1, which ever distrubutes the data between the hard drives. I want a good raid controller that doesn't break the bank and is reliable. Suggestions? TIA!

<< RAID n00b :wave:

Comments

  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Do you have the drives yet?
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    You're looking for RAID 0 - that's the one that stripes the drives. Lets start with the basics:

    SATA or ATA?
  • AuthorityActionAuthorityAction Missouri Member
    edited October 2003
    I have one of the drives right now, the other will hopefully come at christmas.

    It will be ATA.
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    The reason I was asking was because if you didn't have the drives I was going to recomend the Western Digital SATA drives as they don't cost much more than the regular WD SE drives.

    I will still recomend the same controller card. It is designed withSATA interfaces but you can get adapters or go through another retailer that carries thae same card in a package including the adapters. My reasoning is two fold. I have a HPT RocketRaid 133 ATA and a HPT RocketRaid 1520 SATA. The Processor on each is exactly the same so this was a good test. I got over 10,000 MB/sec more with the 1520 SATA and the same two WD1000JB (8MB cache) drives over the ATA card in RAID-0. The reason is that the SATA card uses less of your CPU than the ATA card due to the more efficient design and this results in both more CPU power and better RAID performance. The other benefit is that if you decided to go with SATA drives later you would be all set with a controller. A very nice side benefit is that the cables are so small they don't affect airflow in your case. So based on this I recomend:

    RocketRAID 1520 2-Channel Serial ATA RAID Host Controller

    Newegg has them for $55.00 less adapters.

    16-115-011-04.JPG
  • AuthorityActionAuthorityAction Missouri Member
    edited October 2003
    I wish i had SATA... stupid me :doh:

    Instead of getting 2 more SATA drives i think i'll live with 2 ATA.

    Now if i get the converter in my attached image could i get the rocket raid 1520 and at a later date switch to SATA?
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Exactly! Just make sure the two drives you have will be exactly the same so you can get the best possible performance. That is exactly how I am running right now and can't complain.
  • AuthorityActionAuthorityAction Missouri Member
    edited October 2003
    Alright, awesome. Thanks a lot! :respect:

    I think when i get my Athlon 64 i'll get SATA drives.
  • SimGuySimGuy Ottawa, Canada
    edited October 2003
    The LSI Logic MegaRAID ATA133-2 Channel RAID Adapter.

    LSI makes one of (if not THE) best RAID controllers on the market. Their SCSI RAID controllers are best of class, outperforming any controller from Promise, Silicon Image or 3Ware. I've played with their Buffered 6-Channel SATA RAID Controllers and they perform superbly.

    http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduct.asp?description=16-118-007 - $58.00

    Or, if you do get 2 of those IDE to SATA Coverters, LSI Logic's MegaRAID SATA 150-4 4-Channel SATA RAID Controllers offers exceptional performance in a 1-PCI slot device. The best part is that this controllers has 64 MB's of onboard ECC DDR SDRAM to act as a data buffer, resulting in much higher data reads and writes. The only down side... it's a 64-bit PCI part, meaning you'll need a motherboard capable of supporting 64-bit PCI parts (the extended PCI slots).

    http://www.lsilogic.com/products/stor_prod/raid/1504.html

    Finally, if you want a complete 2-Channel SATA RAID Controller that will offer exceptional writes and reads without breaking the bank... the LSI Logic MegaRAID 150-2 2-Channel SATA RAID Controller will do the job. It isn't buffered, but it will perform faster than similar offerings from Promise, 3Ware or HighPoint.

    http://www.provantage.com/buy-7LSIG00P-megaraid-sata-150-2-controller-channel-lsi-logic-1502000-shopping.htm - $58.00
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited October 2003
    SimGuy, that MegaRAID SATA 150-4 4-Channel SATA RAID controller is just what I'd need for my AMD dually rigs if I wanted to go raid on 1 of them.:thumbsup: I didn't know there were any SATA 64/66 cards out there on the market. The only drawback I see to it is that it's kind of pricey for home use though, around $300 on pricewatch.
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited October 2003
    if he sets up 2 120 gigs on raid, will windows see them as a single 240 ? also do they have to be the same size?
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Armogeddon00 said
    if he sets up 2 120 gigs on raid, will windows see them as a single 240 ? also do they have to be the same size?

    Armogeddon00

    The answer to your first question is, yes.

    As to the second question. If you use 2 drives of different size then the array would be 2x the sixe of the smaller drive and the remainder of the larger drive would remain unused and unuseable. For performance it is preferred to use 2 idetical drives.
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited October 2003
    i get it so haveing a 120 and a 40 on raid would result in an overall of a 80 gig raid, restricting the use of the 120 down to a usable 40 gigs ?
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    Armogeddon00 said
    i get it so haveing a 120 and a 40 on raid would result in an overall of a 80 gig raid, restricting the use of the 120 down to a usable 40 gigs ?
    10-4 Good Buddy
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited October 2003
    The only way that you could get to use the full capacity of 2 different size drives (your 40 and 120 gig drives for example) with raid is to set it up as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), which will span all the drives into 1 big drive, with no performance or fault tolerance increases.
  • ArmoArmo Mr. Nice Guy Is Dead,Only Aqua Remains Member
    edited October 2003
    LOLOLOLOL nice accronymn ranks up there with TWAIN, technology without an interesting name,

    so is the JBOD a division of raid?
  • AuthorityActionAuthorityAction Missouri Member
    edited October 2003
    It wouldn't be possible to have one SATA and one ATA HDD connected to a raid controller in raid 0, would it? You'd either see slow downs or it wouldn't work or something, right?

    More n00b questions...
    Raid 0 stripes the data between the HDD's, right? Raid 1 mirrors the data, correct? and Raid 5 does what? lol. oh wait, one more... are there any other types of raid options? just me being curious.
  • edcentricedcentric near Milwaukee, Wisconsin Icrontian
    edited October 2003
    You might want to consider a controler that can run 0, 1, JBOD and RAID 5. You don't need 5 now, but it is the ultimate and inthe future you might want the ability to go there. There was a raid controler review an Anand a while back that gave the specs of each card. I am on a remote connection, or I would look it up for you.
  • muddocktormuddocktor
    edited October 2003
    I was doing some checking on these LSI Megaaraid 150 SATA controlers tonight and they also make a Meagaraid 150-6, which has 6 channels. You can run it raid 0, 0, 10, 5 or 50. Raid 50 is using 2-raid5 arrays and stiping across them like a raid0 setup uses. You have both rocket fast speed and fault tolerance, if I understand what I read about raid 50 on LSI's site. That controller is only about $65 more than the Megaraid 150-4 also.

    A friend of mine has been making noises about building a video editing dually next month; will probably use one of those 2 controllers in it. Dual AMD MP2800's, 2 gigs ram and some type of raid, either 0, 5 or 50 for the working drive and a 200 gig drive for storage.
  • ShivianShivian Australia
    edited October 2003
    mtgoat said
    ...I got over 10,000 MB/sec more with the 1520 SATA and the same two WD1000JB (8MB cache) drives...
    :wtf::scratch:
    Wouldn't mind a controller that did that! ;D
  • RRLedfordRRLedford Chicago, IL
    edited February 2004
    Help, my new Promise SATA S150-SX4 +256MB cache controller is giving me horrible results in RAID5 mode with three Maxtor 160GB/7200/8MB drives. SiSoft benchmark shows it at about 23000 - matching a single ATA100/2MB drive score.
    System is a Dell PowerEdge 600SC with no other cards. The O/S is Windows XP-Pro + all patches - soon to be Win2003 server Small Buss Edition.
    I installed the WinXp to test if the drive worked well enough to be good for a combined File-Exchange-SharePoint light duty server.

    Promise has no advise on how to improve. Dell does not support either the Promise controller or the WinXP-Pro running on the 600SC.
    Dell wants me to get the LSI 64MB cache SATA card from them & shut up.

    Am I wasting my time with this combination?
    Where do all the ATTO benchmark results come from? What I downloaded won't run saying I don't have an ATTO controller in my system.
  • FlintstoneFlintstone SE Florida
    edited February 2004
    Go Here:
    http://www.attotech.com/software/app1.html

    Download "Windows SCSI Utilities" and install. Then run the Atto Disk Benchmark Program. Simple!
  • TexTex Dallas/Ft. Worth
    edited February 2004
    edcentric wrote:
    You don't need 5 now, but it is the ultimate .

    Ultimate ? Ultimate what? Oh for god sakes.... If you want to buy a bunch of fast modern drives and have a disk subsystem that writes like a single drive made 8 or ten years ago then yes.... raid-5 is the cats meow baby. save your money and go raid-10 if you want redundancy and speed or just raid-1. The overhead of making multiple reads to the other disks in between every write for the parity info with raid-5 just destroys your write performance. It should only really even be used on disks supporting applications that are mostly read and not write based.

    It's the cheapest way to get redundancy in case a disk fails and you pay for that dearly with performance hits. And thats a price I won't pay.

    Tex
Sign In or Register to comment.