I have a Z68 based motherboard with RST 12.6.x orom+driver, 4 x SATA2, 2 x SATA3 Intel ports. I use RAID 1 (in addition to backups) as an extra safeguard against sudden HD failure. It's soft raid, not Adaptec or LSI, but it's good reassurance that sudden disk death won't be too disruptive. Trouble is, I'm out of ports, and I'd like to check what people reckon.
Sadly, rumour says Intel RST can't raid the left-over storage space of SSDs used for caching (although it can present them as usable drives).
The alternative is a 4 port PCIe RAID card that allows my SSD drive to cache an array on its other ports, but I'm really low on cash (the Samsungs really pushed my budget to a limit) and I can't afford the high quality Adaptecs and LSIs that you normally think of with RAID. It probably risks loss of data not yet cached to SSD (cached data would usually write back on reboot), if need be, but if that happens it's often minor and tolerable (non production data-only use) as the SSD won't be a bottleneck, and I'd have that issue anyway with RST. I don't think I can afford what I ideally need, right now, which is X79+ and UPS or battery backed RAID.
Bearing in mind budget pressures what are some good ideas forum users have?
- ■Old setup (just updating): twin 1TB, twin 2TB (heavy VM use), OS SSD, and an old Vertex 3 60GB SSD used for acceleration under Intel RST. 20GB of the Vertex 3 is set aside to cache/accelerate the 2TB array, and 40GB presented as a fast temp disk to the user.
■New setup: twin 1TB, twin 2TB, and twin Samsung 840 Pro 512 GB (yay! Proper SSDs!). The RAID SSD will take over the OS and a lot of the heavy load of the 2 TB drives so it should make a big improvement. Problem is, I'm all out of Intel SATA ports, I can't also add a caching SSD for the 2 TB as before.
Sadly, rumour says Intel RST can't raid the left-over storage space of SSDs used for caching (although it can present them as usable drives).
The alternative is a 4 port PCIe RAID card that allows my SSD drive to cache an array on its other ports, but I'm really low on cash (the Samsungs really pushed my budget to a limit) and I can't afford the high quality Adaptecs and LSIs that you normally think of with RAID. It probably risks loss of data not yet cached to SSD (cached data would usually write back on reboot), if need be, but if that happens it's often minor and tolerable (non production data-only use) as the SSD won't be a bottleneck, and I'd have that issue anyway with RST. I don't think I can afford what I ideally need, right now, which is X79+ and UPS or battery backed RAID.
Bearing in mind budget pressures what are some good ideas forum users have?
) I use 100% RAID1 specifically to save time if I get a disk failure (which happens about once a year on average: 6+ disks, avg life 3-8 years, 1 per year is not unreasonable to plan for). So far it's been easy because RST handles both RAID1 and SSD caching, so I can get decent data speeds from my 2TB HD mirror and almost no data loss on system or HD failure, but I'm now adding 2 top end SSDs and I'm physically out of SATA ports. So I can't add the 2TB caching SSD to the onboard ports, and after pushing the boat for the twin Samsungs, cash is too tight for the usual ideal PCIe solution (which would probably be hardware RAID supporting SSD caching + battery with Adaptec/LSI). So the OP wasn't about choosing RAID or types of backup, it was about getting caching (and keeping raid1active) on my 2TB array given I'm out of ports - can I use Intel RST somehow to do it, or if not, what cards/ideas would help given my limited resources.
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