Need help choosing a hardware raid card

[miketsmith]

I would like to set up a raid 5 on my system for a little bit of redundancy and a speed increase. I was thinking of setting 4 drives into a raid 5, but I hear that it is a good idea to use a raid controller card to do this (as calculating parity can flood the bus, and not give you the performance you would like)
I see there are many options available through sites like newegg, but the price points range widely from 50 dollars to 2000 dollars.

Can someone help me find a suitable card for 4, (or if not much more expensive) 8 sata 3.0Gbit or 6.0Gbit interface drives? Thanks much!

 

[WyomingKnott]

Someone posted a real beauty here recently. It was Firewire2 in this thread: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/forum2.php?config=tomshardwareus.inc&cat=32&post=266995&page=1&p=1&sondage=0&owntopic=1&trash=0&trash_post=0&print=0&numreponse=0&quote_only=0&new=0&nojs=0

The device is: http://www.datoptic.com/esata-hardware-raid-controller.html

See if this looks good to you. It seems to be limited to the throughput of one SATA II channel. FireWire2, is something similar in SATA III out yet?

 

[miketsmith]

Looks like it would be working off of a single bus, so the reads/writes would be maxed at 3.0gbit (300MBS useable, I think)

 

[saiyan]

Can someone help me find a suitable card for 4, (or if not much more expensive) 8 sata 3.0Gbit or 6.0Gbit interface drives? Thanks much!

If you are looking for a controller supporting up to 8 SATA 6Gb/s drives and willing to spend about $600, I would recommend Areca ARC-1880i. This card has two SAS connectors, comes with two SFF-8087 cables for connecting up to 8 SATA hard drives and has very good performance.

 

[FireWire2]

Looks like it would be working off of a single bus, so the reads/writes would be maxed at 3.0gbit (300MBS useable, I think)

The beauty of this hardware raid controller is driver-less, as far as system concern it sees the raid as a SINGLE hdd
with transfer rate of 230~250MB/s

So if you need more speed just add another one and create a raid0

With 2x SPM393 cost at $240.00, you can create a RAID50 (10x HDD) and it can transfer about 450~495MB/sec with email notification

Of course if you want faster than add another controller...

miketsmith wrote :

Can someone help me find a suitable card for 4, (or if not much more expensive) 8 sata 3.0Gbit or 6.0Gbit interface drives? Thanks much!

There is NO hardware controller 8ports PCIe that costs below $400.00

 

[miketsmith]

What kind of a write/read speed can you get out of a single drive these days?
What about four port cards under 400?

And how does this look? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003

 

[FireWire2]

What kind of a write/read speed can you get out of a single drive these days?
What about four port cards under 400?

And how does this look? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816131003

This is very good raid card, you may able to get about 300MB/sec on raid5 with 4 drives (7200rpm)