Sometime in the future I plan on getting a PCI-E 1x RAID card. I want a true hardware based RAID card. I don't want software RAID and I don't want hardware assisted RAID. It's getting hard to tell the difference from reading the product literature these days. I want a card that does either RAID 3 and/or RAID 5 and supports at least 4 SATA drives. Anyone have any suggestions and/or products that you can vouch for and don't cost a stupid amount? The card will be used for a personal workstation and not in a high read volume server environment.

I used to be a fan of the Netcell based cards, but the Netcell company isn't around anymore and the existing cards are unsupported. They were cheap. They provided true hardware RAID 3. They didn't require the installation of third party drivers like most RAID cards. Plug and play at its finest.

8/13/2007 5:02:27 PM

for personal use is there really that big of a difference between software RAID and hardware RAID?, specifically to justify the cost?

i don't think so

many newer motherboards to date have RAID 5 w/ 4 SATA ports

[Edited on August 13, 2007 at 5:07 PM. Reason : .]

8/13/2007 5:07:03 PM

Adaptec makes the 3405 card, which is a 4x PCI-E hardware RAID card which supports RAID 0, 1, 1E, 5, 5EE, 6, 10, 50*, 60*, and JBOD ( http://www.adaptec.com/en-US/products/sata_cards/value/SAS-3405/ )

It can be had for about $300 on Newegg


I think any PCI-E hardware RAID card is going to be far overkill for what you want to do for personal use though.

** LSI makes the 4-port MegaRAID SAS/SATA 8240ELP PCI-E 4x card as well

*** FYI: you can put a higher speed PCI Express card in a lower speed slot, it just involves some manual modification of the slot with a dremel and a steady hand. We've done this at work to put cheap 16x PCI-E video cards into servers with only 8x PCI-E slots on board.

[Edited on August 13, 2007 at 5:46 PM. Reason : .]

8/13/2007 5:39:14 PM

^^ The object is to free up CPU cycles, not that too many are lost to managing software RAID. The newer boards, like the nVidia nForce4 series and others all use software or hardware assisted raid.

While the machine in question won't be a database server or anything like that. It will be used for data analysis which means running CPU intensive algorithms on many gigabytes of data. Thus, I'm looking for good data data bandwidth where I won't eatup and more CPU cycles than nesessary. I'm also looking for storage effeciency for budget reasons.

8/13/2007 6:13:55 PM

FWIW, my cpu load % went from 2% (single drive) to 4% (software RAID 0), so if 2% cpu cycle is worth $300 than by all means...

8/13/2007 6:17:04 PM

RAID-5 parity calculations are CPU intensive for high data transfer rates, which is the reason to want to move that to an external hardware based RAID card.

Mirroring and Striping (RAID-0 and RAID-1) are minimal on CPU usage for software based RAID.

8/13/2007 6:33:31 PM

true

8/13/2007 6:48:40 PM