RAID 5 Array with 3TB drives

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Zoidman

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Looking for a motherboard/RAID card that supports 3TB drives in RAID 5.

I am looking to add 4, 3TB drives in a RAID5 array for my media collection. I have looked over the forums and the internet and can't find any clear or good answers for what supports the RAID using 3tb drives and need some help picking something.

The RocketRAID 2300 seems like it might do what I want. Any more suggestions or ideas?
If I need to get a RAID card I need to keep it around 100, and under 150$ if possible.
I'm using an AMD based processor, and getting a new motherboard that supports these features would be fine too.

Thanks for any help!! :)
 
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loosescrews

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The HighPoint cards are crap. They are incredibly slow and have terrible drivers. I would recommend a used LSI or Areca RAID card. You can often find them pretty cheap on ebay. If you can't find one that you are happy with, use your motherboard's built-in RAID. That will be better than the HighPoint card.

I have a RAID 5 of 3 3TB drives on a LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i card. I used to own a HighPoint card and it was complete and utter crap.
 
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Zoidman

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I can't seem to justify the the cost of the LSI MegaRAID cards, as nice as they are, it looks like they are about ~250 on eBay for the one you mentioned.

From what I can tell the Intel RAID controllers on mobo's don't have support for drives >3TB in RAID. I don't know what other mobos have to offer.
Do you have a recommendation of a motherboard then?

Edit:
I don't mind spending about 250$ on a new motherboard, I need a new one anyway though.
 
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Photopilot

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Loosescrews, can you suggest such an LSI controller? One that will have lots of capabilities like up to 8 HDDs and RAID 6 capabilities but be SATA II so be less expensive?
 
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Photopilot

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Thanks LS,
That card was already on my radar. I have been trying to get a server up and running and my HP card is not a very good one so did not try to use it but used the built in RAID on my A8N-SLI-deluxe motherboard. Which turns out has a 1.7TB limit on RAID size, making it useless. Do you think this LSI controller will have any size limitations based on use in my older motherboard?

My primary interest is creating a Raid 5 with 3 2TB HDs then expanding it out with more drives down the road as needed.
 
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loosescrews

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I haven't used that specific card or your specific motherboard. I can not make any guarantees with regards to compatibility. I can tell you this: I was unable to get my LSI MegaRAID 9260-8i card to work with a ASUS P5N-D (Nvidia nForce 750i chipset) motherboard. The same card works great with my newer EVGA SR-2 motherboard. YMMV. You could buy the card and then return it if you can't get it to work.
 
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Photopilot

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Since my motherboard uses the nForce SLI chipset, I am suspect of its compatibility with this card as well. While this RAID card may still be supported any information on my MOBO from the last 3+ years is hard to come by.
 
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hartloop

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I have the same problem and am stuck as well made the mistake on buying 6 x 3TB drives my intension was to put them in a Raid 5 setup in my PC
Only to find that windows 7 64bit don’t support raid 5 and now finding it hard to find Raid card that will support 3TB drives
Most of them have a limit of 2TB per drive
Do any one know if the raid cards below will support 3TB drives ?

3Ware 9650SE-16ML PCI-E16 PORT SATAII RAID

AMCC 3WARE 9650SE-12ML 12 PORT RAID CONTROLLER CARD SATA II
 
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stoff75

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I have just setup a 4*3TB RAID 5 using Intel Rapid Storage Technology on my old Gigabyte GA-Z68P-DS3 board with a cheap Intel G630 CPU. Wish I could say it's "going great" but I'm having trouble pushing about 40 megabytes/sec write spead and 80 megabytes/sec read.

That's before I starting initializing it (which wasn't needed at first but I got the recommendation that would speed it up a bit so it's doing that right now).

Point is, don't bother with expensive slot in cards when a cheap Z68 board and one of the cheapest processors can get the job done.
 
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loosescrews

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I am not sure what you are trying to say.

I have a very similar setup, a 4*3TB RAID 5. The difference is that I am using an LSI MegaRAID 9271-8i and I am getting around 500MB/s read and write.

You need a real RAID card if you want good performance with RAID5. Onboard RAID is fine for RAID 0 or 1.
 
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stoff75

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My original point was that it's uneccessary to buy extra hardware for your computer when your existing hardware can get the job done. It's also "safer" for RAID5 since if you burn a circuit on your motherboard you can replace it with any motherboard supporting Intel RST (pretty much all intel based cards), whereas if you have special hardware you'll need another card from the same manufacturer to access the data (unless things have changed on that front).

But after testing around with RAID5 for a while I must admit that Intel RST really isn't up to it. I couldn't get over 30 mbyte write speed which just isn't good enough for me. Might be for some but not me. So I'm on RAID10 using Intel RST now which gives me awesome read & write speed so I'm happpy with that :)
 
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loosescrews

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There is a program called R-Studio that can access data on arrays without the controller. I have used it to read data off my RAID 5 array that was created with an LSI RAID card. In addition, motherboards are typically more frequently upgraded and are more likely to fail.

RAID 10 is much simpler than RAID 5 as it requires less calculation. Intel's onboard RAID is perfectly capable of giving good performance with RAID 0 and RAID 1, so there is no reason to think that it couldn't do the same for RAID 10. In fact, I have found that Intel's onboard RAID yields significantly higher random I/O speed for a RAID 0 of SSDs than the same setup using an LSI 9260-8i. The LSI card yielded faster sequential I/O and I haven't tested it with my LSI 9271-8iCC yet (the LSI 9271-8iCC is supposed to be much better with SSDs than the LSI 9260-8i).

Back on the topic of RAID 5, 30 MB/s is much slower than even a single drive and is completely unacceptable performance. RAID 5 should result in an array with better performance than a single drive, and depending on the configuration, much higher performance than a single drive.

EDIT:
I would also like to point out that the original question was about an AMD motherboard and RAID 5, not Intel and RAID 10.
 
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Zoidman

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So I finally got around to purchasing the LSI 84016E RAID card recommended.
Since the original post I've upgraded my motherboard as well to a newer Asus M5A97 R2.0.

For everyone having trouble getting their LSI card to be recognized on a mobo for me I had to switch it to the number 1 PCIe and move my video card down.

The sad news is though, that the card is only recognizing 2TB of my 3TB HDD's. I have 3, 3TB drives and can only get a RAID 5 array of 4TB. Most disappointing.

Anyone have any tips? Maybe it's a setting I'm missing? Or do I just need to upgrade to a newer RAID card?
I've already updated to the newest firmware on the RAID card and that didn't help.
 
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