Which S-ATA controller card?

[fredfrederick]

I'm not fully sure if this is the right forum, but here goes...

I have my eye on 3 x Hitachi t7k250 drives for a RAID-5 implementation. The motherboard I've got predates S-ATA, so I need a PCI based controller card.

Is there much difference between cards. Obviously I need something that'll do RAID-5 and I don't want to be much over £50.

What determines the speed/performance of a S-ATA controller card, is there anything I should be looking for in particular?

Also, with the t-series hitachi drives, I'm told you can get them to run at the 3gbps standard by installing some software. Will RAID mess this up in any way(being windows will see the 3 drives as 1)

 

[tslok]

Hello, Fred: Here are my experience with SATA interface:

1) I have good luck with Silicon Imaging SATA controller chip set. I found them to be good performance and reliable.

2) Make sure your HDD will support SATAII interface which is 300 MBps. I will only use either Hitachi or Seagate. Hitachi HDD will automatically detect your system to decide whether it will run in 150 or 300 mode. Seagate HDD will require a jumper. I found both of them run well with no problem.

3) Make sure your host adapter card is SATAII capable and it is either PCI-X or PCI-E. If it is only PCI card, it will not be able to support SATAII 300 MB/s data transfer rate.

Good luck!

 

[Madwand]

RAID 5 needs a good implementation, else the write performance is bad.

I'd suggest instead getting another drive, and getting another MB with on-board RAID 10 -- this will be faster because it's simpler, and also faster because you avoid the PCI bus limitations.

If you really want, you should be able to find a relatively inexpensive PCI RAID 10 card -- this could perform OK; probably much better than any inexpensive RAID 5 controller for writes.

One big downside here is expansion -- you couldn't just add another drive if you ran short of space in the array.