Raid controllers

[MousePotato]

Any good recommendations?

[Zero1]

Hmm RAID.

First off, check out my bit of a RAID guide here

As for recommended, the undoubtedly best RAID (read VERY expensive) controllers are from a company called 3ware:

3ware American site
3ware UK site (usually contains more specific information)

And here's a link to their latest controller, Escalade 9000 series

As you can see, that's all very high performance and pricey, actually I was talking to Derobert one night, to find that Kero (aka Nago2, the .org's new server) has an Escalade RAID card, with no less than 12 x250GB hard drives rigged up to it.

[Image]

But yes, 3ware essentially manufacture server grade RAID cards which have very high performance and a very high price tag.


So what is there for us mortals?

You could check out some of the stuff from Highpoint. I've got their Rocket Raid SATA 1640 controller and the only time it sort of let me down was when I had a fubar BIOS. To be honest it didn't even let me down, more like the opposite, you see the BIOS in the motherboard was corrupt and was causing the RAID card to think the array was broken. Well I moved the card into my other machine and it was fine.


There is also another manufacturer called Silicon Image who tend to do a lot for onboard RAID, I'm actually using an onboard Silicon Image RAID (eugh) and it's not very impressive, sometimes I seriously wonder if I'd be better operating a standalone drive.

Take that comment with a pinch of salt though since I am using a different stripe size from what I used to (I was using a 32KB stripe size on the Highpoint PCI RAID, am now using a 128KB stripe size on the on board Silicon Image RAID), but larger is not necessarilly slower, it depends on the size of files you most commonly access (as described in the guide) and tests show that a 128KB stripe size is supposed to be the "jack of all trades".

That's something to think about, if you love your computers and stuff and/or are a fortunate kinda guy, go grab a 3ware Escalade and fill it with at least 4 drives, you won't regret it, if not go for Highpoint, or if you are watching the pennies or (insert lowest denomination of local currency here), or simply want something cheap to get started out with RAID go with the Silicon Image.


The main thing to remember is always buy the best you can afford, it's likely that something more expensive will have a feature or two more than the cheaper one that could probably save your ass at some point.