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    #1

    Hardware RAID

    Need some input from you characters. I've been spending some (actually most) of my time trying to tie up some (read:quite a few) unfinished projects.

    Is there such a thing as a hardware RAID controller that has RAID5 (RAID6 would be a plus), SATA II, minimum 6 internal drives, PCI bus, and under...oh...say...$300?

    more is always better....except with price

    I have GOT to get this damned HTPC done and off the "bench".
    "Its all about the boom....."

    Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat.

    We now return you to your regularly scheduled drinking.

    "Fear accompanies the possibility of death.....calm shepherds its certainty"

    Originally posted by Topcat
    AWD is just training wheels for RWD.
    Tags: None
    #2
    Re: Hardware RAID

    http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-3ware-9650SE...item230b747bb1

    I've got one myself. it works like a champ! BBU allows you to safely run write caching. Full hardware RAID, supports all popular arrays, and can get up to 24 channel. I just linked that as a reference, if you hunt you could probably find one cheaper.
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      #3
      Re: Hardware RAID

      I assume youre going to fit them in an NAS or an enclosure with a port replicator. I've been doing some reading at storagereview, and if you want to save a lot of money, you should go with ZFS. This way you don't need TLER/CCTL drives, nor an expensive controller. And the redundancy is a lot better too. You will need some familiarity with Linux however.
      "We have offered them (the Arabs) a sensible way for so many years. But no, they wanted to fight. Fine! We gave them technology, the latest, the kind even Vietnam didn't have. They had double superiority in tanks and aircraft, triple in artillery, and in air defense and anti-tank weapons they had absolute supremacy. And what? Once again they were beaten. Once again they scrammed [sic]. Once again they screamed for us to come save them. Sadat woke me up in the middle of the night twice over the phone, 'Save me!' He demanded to send Soviet troops, and immediately! No! We are not going to fight for them."

      -Leonid Brezhnev (On the Yom Kippur War)

      Comment

        #4
        Re: Hardware RAID

        Originally posted by Topcat View Post
        http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-3ware-9650SE...item230b747bb1

        I've got one myself. it works like a champ! BBU allows you to safely run write caching. Full hardware RAID, supports all popular arrays, and can get up to 24 channel. I just linked that as a reference, if you hunt you could probably find one cheaper.

        $400?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

        <cough> <cough>

        <passes out>


        <regains consciousness sometime later.....>

        Originally posted by mockingbird View Post
        I assume youre going to fit them in an NAS or an enclosure with a port replicator. I've been doing some reading at storagereview, and if you want to save a lot of money, you should go with ZFS. This way you don't need TLER/CCTL drives, nor an expensive controller. And the redundancy is a lot better too. You will need some familiarity with Linux however.
        ok...i guess i need to start taking drugs......or just say screw it......



        i just want a large array that allows redundancy in case a drive fails. I want to put a bunch of ripped DVDs on it and I don't want to have to rerip shit when a drive fails....knock on wood...i haven't had one fail yet...but....



        the Abit IX38 GT I have supposedly has Intel ICH9R RAID5 support. I set the option in BIOS. I get the RAID configurator (prior to OS boot) and set all 6 drives to a single RAID5 array. Then when WinXP 64 boots, I have to tell it is GPT or some shit. Then its happy. Next time I boot it, it tells me I have to format the drive. Yeah right. I don't have the patience to put up with its crap anymore. If I had patience, I'd be a frickin' doctor and if i was a doctor i'd have tons of money to get someone to do this crap for me.
        Last edited by stretch0069; 01-31-2011, 05:45 AM.
        "Its all about the boom....."

        Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat.

        We now return you to your regularly scheduled drinking.

        "Fear accompanies the possibility of death.....calm shepherds its certainty"

        Originally posted by Topcat
        AWD is just training wheels for RWD.

        Comment

          #5
          Re: Hardware RAID

          This is not reliable. ICH Raid without TLER/CCTL is unreliable. When your drives deveop weak sectors, there is a timeout period in which they are allowed to recover.

          Drives that allow this to be changed can be set to a short retry period. Common desktop drives try for too long and the array drops them out. Yes, even RAID 5 will be unsafe in this scenario.

          Like I said, set yourself up a cheap Linux box and run the drives in a ZFS array. Won't cost you a penny.
          "We have offered them (the Arabs) a sensible way for so many years. But no, they wanted to fight. Fine! We gave them technology, the latest, the kind even Vietnam didn't have. They had double superiority in tanks and aircraft, triple in artillery, and in air defense and anti-tank weapons they had absolute supremacy. And what? Once again they were beaten. Once again they scrammed [sic]. Once again they screamed for us to come save them. Sadat woke me up in the middle of the night twice over the phone, 'Save me!' He demanded to send Soviet troops, and immediately! No! We are not going to fight for them."

          -Leonid Brezhnev (On the Yom Kippur War)

          Comment

            #6
            Re: Hardware RAID

            Why not buy a couple of 4 bay enclosures with port multipliers and plug them into the free SATA card included?
            sig files are for morons

            Comment

              #7
              Re: Hardware RAID

              No, don't get the cheap enclosures. The Sil multiplexer chip that they use is a piece of junk.
              "We have offered them (the Arabs) a sensible way for so many years. But no, they wanted to fight. Fine! We gave them technology, the latest, the kind even Vietnam didn't have. They had double superiority in tanks and aircraft, triple in artillery, and in air defense and anti-tank weapons they had absolute supremacy. And what? Once again they were beaten. Once again they scrammed [sic]. Once again they screamed for us to come save them. Sadat woke me up in the middle of the night twice over the phone, 'Save me!' He demanded to send Soviet troops, and immediately! No! We are not going to fight for them."

              -Leonid Brezhnev (On the Yom Kippur War)

              Comment

                #8
                Re: Hardware RAID

                Originally posted by stretch0069 View Post
                $400?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

                <cough> <cough>

                <passes out>


                <regains consciousness sometime later.....>
                Unfortunately, if you want TRUE hardware SATA2 RAID with more than 4 channels, be prepared to pay, the controllers arent cheap......but in the end, you get what ya paid for. As I mentioned, I linked that one as reference only. They can be had a little cheaper if you dig around.
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                  #9
                  Re: Hardware RAID

                  For redundancy, hardware raid is a waste of money. The only thing it's good for is speed.
                  "We have offered them (the Arabs) a sensible way for so many years. But no, they wanted to fight. Fine! We gave them technology, the latest, the kind even Vietnam didn't have. They had double superiority in tanks and aircraft, triple in artillery, and in air defense and anti-tank weapons they had absolute supremacy. And what? Once again they were beaten. Once again they scrammed [sic]. Once again they screamed for us to come save them. Sadat woke me up in the middle of the night twice over the phone, 'Save me!' He demanded to send Soviet troops, and immediately! No! We are not going to fight for them."

                  -Leonid Brezhnev (On the Yom Kippur War)

                  Comment

                    #10
                    Re: Hardware RAID

                    ^
                    Not correct.
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                      #11
                      Re: Hardware RAID

                      I refer you to this post at the StorageReview forums:

                      Why don't you want TLER even if your disks are capable?
                      If you don't need TLER, then you don't want TLER! Why? Well because TLER is dangerous! Nonesense? Consider this:

                      1. You have a nice RAID5 array on Hardware RAID, being a valuable customer you spent the premium price on TLER capable disks.
                      2. Now one of your disk dies; oh bummer! But hey i have RAID5; i' protected, RIGHT?
                      3. So i buy a new disk, and replace the failed one! So easy, ha ha!
                      4. Oh noooes! A bad sector on of the remaining member disks, and it caused TLER to forfeit; now i got an I/O error during rebuilding my degraded array and the rebuild stopped and i lost access to my data! Arrrrgh!!

                      The danger in TLER lies that if you lost your redundancy, then if a weak sector occurs that COULD be recovered, TLER will force the drive to STOP TRYING after 7 seconds. If it didn't fix it by then, and you lost your redundancy, then TLER is a harmful property instead of a useful one.

                      TLER works best when you got alot of redundancy and can swap disks easily, and want disks that show any sign of weakness - if even just a fart - to be kicked out and replaced ASAP, without causing hickups which are unacceptable to a heavy-duty online money transaction server, for example. So TLER can be useful, but for consumers this is more like an interesting way for vendors to make some more money from you poor souls!
                      Like he says, ZFS is currently the best redundant solution for RAID. Maybe there are hardware cards out there, probably exclusively proprietary, ranging in the thousands of dollars that can do what it does.
                      "We have offered them (the Arabs) a sensible way for so many years. But no, they wanted to fight. Fine! We gave them technology, the latest, the kind even Vietnam didn't have. They had double superiority in tanks and aircraft, triple in artillery, and in air defense and anti-tank weapons they had absolute supremacy. And what? Once again they were beaten. Once again they scrammed [sic]. Once again they screamed for us to come save them. Sadat woke me up in the middle of the night twice over the phone, 'Save me!' He demanded to send Soviet troops, and immediately! No! We are not going to fight for them."

                      -Leonid Brezhnev (On the Yom Kippur War)

                      Comment

                        #12
                        Re: Hardware RAID

                        While I agree with you that hardware RAID on SATA isn't worth the trouble, and ZFS is a great solution, that person doesn't get it. Hard to take him seriously when he spells and writes like a 12 year old. TLER prevents the drive from going away and contemplating its navel for 30 seconds. With TLER the drive reports an error, and the RAID controller handles it. Without TLER the controller fails the drive and drops it out of the array. A "heavy-duty online money transaction server" wouldn't be using SATA drives.
                        36 Monitors, 3 TVs, 4 Laptops, 1 motherboard, 1 Printer, 1 iMac, 2 hard drive docks and one IP Phone repaired so far....

                        Comment

                          #13
                          Re: Hardware RAID

                          As I've written in other posts on this matter software RAID (the kind of fakeraid implemented on mainboards and cheap add in controllers) is best avoided when it comes to complex RAID levels (like RAID5 or RAID6)

                          They can work quite fine with RAID0, RAID1 or RAID10 though

                          And herein lies the problem, a disk is very cheap today
                          A hardware RAID controller is not so cheap

                          So for example if you want 4TB of usable space you could buy 3x 2TB drives and RAID5 them.
                          Or you could buy 4x 2TB drives and RAID10 them

                          The latter will provide both better performance, better redundancy and lower cost as long as you compare vs a true hardware RAID controller...

                          Disclaimer: I own a LSI 8704ELP RAID controller which i run RAID5 on via 3x 1TB drives, I've also used the same drives before I bought the controller on the ICH9R controller on my Maximus Formula X38 mainboard....
                          "The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it."

                          Comment

                            #14
                            Re: Hardware RAID

                            I agree with SW RAID under Linux. If you want some interesting transfer speeds, Linux (VsFTPd) is the way to go.
                            Less jewellery, more gold into electrotech industry! Half of the computer problems is caused by bad contacts

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                              #15
                              Re: Hardware RAID

                              On 32-Bit PCI? You want 6 x Sata 3.0Gbps?

                              I don't think that's physically possible.

                              For PCI-Express, one of these http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816103097 are pretty awesome.

                              You'll need a SAS to SATA breakout cable, which is cheap...

                              Comment

                                #16
                                Re: Hardware RAID

                                Back on track, I would be interested in finding a hardware RAID card suitable for ESX 4 (vmware).
                                Most of my operating environment is now on VM, but it would be nice to have the underlying disk system at RAID1 (mirror).

                                As noted above, the consumer/desktop drives present potential problems to ICH raid.
                                I run ICH10 as RAID1 anyway, because potential for a problem is less impact than a single disk failure and guaranteed data loss.

                                Yes, it takes two days to rebuild a 2+2 TB RAID1, but the data is preserved.
                                The super paranoid can also do an ICH10 RAID1 as 3x drives.

                                As noted above, be prepared to pay for stable hardware raid.
                                Those coughing over a few bucks should check into EMC array$...
                                They cost more than most folks make in a life time.

                                Comment

                                  #17
                                  Re: Hardware RAID

                                  sorry about being away....lots of crap happening.

                                  i think what i will do is use the onboard RAID and do a RAID10 with 1TB drives.

                                  too much crap to think about

                                  we have two EMC big honkin' DASDs at work. Run 24/7....in the past 6 years we've had one 72GB drive go bad, but everything kept running smoothly.....which is good since we keep track of all that metal flying around
                                  "Its all about the boom....."

                                  Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat.

                                  We now return you to your regularly scheduled drinking.

                                  "Fear accompanies the possibility of death.....calm shepherds its certainty"

                                  Originally posted by Topcat
                                  AWD is just training wheels for RWD.

                                  Comment

                                    #18
                                    Re: Hardware RAID

                                    We run rows of Symmetrix.. drives go bad all the time... EMC comes in and replaces them.
                                    Life in Big Storage.

                                    Best of luck on the RADI10.
                                    I'm skeptical of Windows+firmware (Intel ICH), so I restrain myself to RAID1 only.

                                    The points made above about TLER issues with consumer level drives are valid.
                                    I've had a couple of arrays crap out, so I try a rebuild on the array first.
                                    If it succeeds, I chalk it up to TLER burps and keep an eye on it.

                                    Comment

                                      #19
                                      Re: Hardware RAID

                                      here's what sucks.....just did an update to the PS3.....netflix is there....if they have all the movies i have, i just might pay the $8 a month and just not worry about it. plus all the time to rip my DVDs. Still might do a couple of the TV shows I have, but not the whole collection.

                                      Oh well....wait long enough and the world changes around you.
                                      "Its all about the boom....."

                                      Guns kill people like spoons made Rosie O'Donnell fat.

                                      We now return you to your regularly scheduled drinking.

                                      "Fear accompanies the possibility of death.....calm shepherds its certainty"

                                      Originally posted by Topcat
                                      AWD is just training wheels for RWD.

                                      Comment

                                        #20
                                        Re: Hardware RAID

                                        netflix online dosen't have the selection you might think, they don't even have star trek!

                                        anyways, if you want to make any kind of server, linux software raid (mdadm) is what i've used like forever, but keep in mind not all chipsets support hot swapping under linux

                                        thelaw, it certainly is possible because even though 3.0gbps is the protocol, most drives peak at about ~60-70MBps, higher for enterprise class drives (SAS, WD RE's, raptors)
                                        Cap Datasheet Depot: http://www.paullinebarger.net/DS/
                                        ^If you have datasheets not listed PM me

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