Good Sata Raid Cards?

[Gendo Ikari]

it seems I bought two new Sata drives for my server without realizing I'd used up all my cards LOL!

So I was wondering, what are some good cards ya'll can recommend? I have two different Rosewill models, but the $10 4-port model I got two of at tigerdirect doesn't seem to recognize any drives above 500GB's =/

I also have a non-raid 4-port Promise card, but from a-lot of the reviews on newegg, their sata raid card's seem to be a bit...buggy..

I'm looking for a 4-port model for just mirroring and/or JBOD, I don't really need raid 5, but an 8-port would be good too. Also PCI or PCI-X please, since it's a pre-PCI-Express machine.

[willawake]

Re: Good Sata Raid Cards?

i would prefer silicon image to promise. i had a promise on an asus board and it would periodically lose the mirror disk on reboot. what a pos. that wasnt even a driver issue that was when the raid bios loads.

but i have not tried silicon image for raid. i used ide controller cards with their chips in the office when we had many old pcs. zero problem but again i did not use the raid feature.

two of the better brands used on servers are LSI and 3ware. but 3ware at least in their lowest models only use promise if i recall correctly or another brand. I suppose adaptec is another choice but i went off them after upgrading a scanner computer to win2k and having to use forceaspi to install aspi 4.60 or 4.61 after their 4.70 and 4.71 just make windows stick.

[gonzo0815]

Re: Good Sata Raid Cards?

I have used cheap no name Silicon Image SIL3512 card lately for a simple NAS box. Driver support is ok, i have tried it with Linux, Windows and FreeBSD. Even native Acronis TI support is ok ( with IDE BIOS, not RAID BIOS).

There are different BIOS available by d/l from Silicon Image, so you can switch between RAID, SATA & IDE mode.

Raid is software raid of course. If you only need a simple controller card, i would not pay to much for fancy brand names.
Only real hardware raid controller or those which do support features like NCQ by an own controller are worth the extra bucks.
For a simple file server i don´t think it is ultimately necessary.

[PCBONEZ]

Re: Good Sata Raid Cards?

I've been using Promise [IDE] for years (since ATA-33 was fast) and never had a significant problem with them.
I like them because the RAID info is stored on the drive so if the card fails you can simply switch in a new Promise card and 'go'. It doesn't even have to be the same model Promise card usually. Also as long as it's not the boot drive you can literally move an entire array into another system, load drivers into the new system's OS, and your done.

I recently got a batch of 3Ware cards because I needed 8 drives on one card.
Don't have enough history with those to make a call but so far I like them.

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