Non-RAID SATA II card?

thepregnantgod

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Community, I currently have 4 3TB Western Digital Green drives connected to a RocketRAID 2300. I'm suffering from the TLER problem (drives allow for 90 seconds to correct errors but the controller card drops it when it does this...) This TLER problem took down my RAID 5 so I switched them all to Legacy (basically just a standard drive) but even now the card drops the drive if it doesn't respond in time.

After exhaustive research, it seems that were I to connect the drives to something like the onboard Intel ports this wouldn't happen as the onboard controllers don't drop drives like RAID controllers.

I'm currently using all my Intel SATA and Marvell Controllers.

Is there a PCI Express x1 card out there that will act like the onboard Intel controllers (i.e. provide SMART status and not drop from TLER problems)?

 

x Heavy

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Your title is contradictory. You want a non raid card but yet want to run a bunch of drives together.

And you indicate your mobo is full of drives.

You might want to search Newegg for a 650 dollar LSI raid controller that has 8 ports to plug into, but for the money you probably want to replace the motherboard with more SATA III slots and or add on to x4 or x6 or even a x16 slot with a Revo and throw your old drives into the parts box.
 

thepregnantgod

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Heavy, I'm running a P67 Mobo with 6xSSDs connected to the Intel Mobo and 2 storage drives connected to the Marvell controllers. I could set up a separate Server but would prefer not to have yet another PC in the home in addition to the others.

The LSI raid controller you mentioned is an option - I would migrate my OS to that and put the storage drives on the Intel mobo...

 
You need to contact Highpoint with your issue, they might have a fix. The problem is your HBA's FW is dropping drives from the array due to no-responce within a time period. That time period needs to be extended, so contact the manufacturer and see what solutions they might have. I have that exact same HBA and I haven't run into any issues with TLER, but again it's more a difference between your disks and the HBA.
 

thepregnantgod

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palladin...I put together an old quadcore with 8gigs ram for the Win7 file server. It runs ICH9R which is what I need for these green drives. Software RAID seems to be more gentle when it comes to TLER instead of hardware RAID. And since the files are shared over gigabit there's no need for superperformance anyway.
 
Well if you have the HW laying around all ready go for it. I prefer the mediasoncis as should your file server crash and burn, the array is seperate and modular. You can disconnect it and plug it into any system and your data is still alive. Softraid isn't as kind, you have to use the same chipset or a compatible one to get your data back.
 

thepregnantgod

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palladin, I think I might create a new post under storage to list all my experiences...but the short of it, ICH9R doesn't support 3TB drives in RAID or in BIOS. The intel matrix driver does pick it up as 3tb within windows but you can't raid them.

In the end, it's not as clean but I have 6 3TB drives connected to the Intel SATA ports - they stream bluray fine at about 50-60mbps. They're not redundant like a RAID 5 would be if I lose one, I only lose 1/6th of my media collection.
 
50-60? Is that MegaByte or Megabit?

I get 120 MegaBytes per second sustained off the ProRAID box in a RAID0, going to RAID5 slowed it down to 70~80 MBps due to one less disk rotating.

Average physical HDD's can get 30~40 MBps sustained, dependent on where on the disk your reading from. Theoretical limit would be 120~160MBps, but then not every file access is equal so 120MBps is pretty good.