SATA-II Raid Card Selection Help! ( 2 Views )

1. how do these compare to one another? any other i should know about? I am trying to keep the price down but i need "pretty good" Raid-5 performance and i'd like it to be true hardware based (i dont need it eating my CPU cycles)
   
   PROMISE SuperTrak EX8300 PCI-X SATA II RAID Controller - Link
   
   3ware 9550SX-8LP 64-bit/133MHz PCI-X SATA II Raid Controller - Link
   
   HighPoint RocketRAID 2320 PCI Express x4 SATA II RAID Card - help!Link
   
   I have both pci-e and pc-x slots on my board...any noticable difference between the highpoint and the others? i'll be placing 6 drives on which ever card i get...
   
   ...2x raptor 150gig in Raid-0 (need high performance)
   ...3x Seagate 500gig in Raid-5 (need somewhat good performance)
   ...1x Seagate 400gig by itself
   
   Are boot times affected by using a raid card? any other factors affected? will the pci-e 4x card take up some bandwidth from my SLi setup?
   
   
   (davut, Russian Federation)


2. 1) Haven't seen any reviews. It looks too good to be true, and if Promise keeps up their trend, it is. However, Highpoint *really* turned itself around with the sata cards, so who knows. Almost certainly fast hardware raid - the IOP331 is crazy good. Potentially good, and cheap, but it depends strongly on how well the drivers are done.
   
   2) Good but expensive, but not the most of either. The Areca takes that title in my book. True hardware raid, but look at the pics; you *need* 3.3v support for this, and you can't have 5v support on that slot.
   
   3) My current top recommendation (if you've got pci express >< ). Software raid, but very well done software raid. Up to 350 MB/s on raid 5, albeit with 100% cpu usage at that rate. If you put the card into another machine, and use it as a NAS box, this isn't a concern at all.
   
   All that said, what are you doing with this array?
   
   
   
   
   (Cenk, Palau)


3. ive begun to doubt the type of storage subsystem i'll be employing in this next build..
   
   i need a large amount of storage, upwards of 1.5 tb...i dont need absolute fastest performance but it cant be slow
   
   ...for my boot drive i want pure speed while sticking within reason (ie. raptors in raid-0)
   
   i want a true hardware solution, dont want anything stealing cpu cycles...
   
   and most importantly i need redundancy!!!
   
   
   (Emre, Dominican Republic)


4. unhappy_mage: is the 2320 software raid multithreaded? dual core would limit it to 50% cpu usage, which, which still stealing cpu cycles, would limit it to a reasonable amount (as well as giving you awesome performance).
   
   So, is it multithreaded?
   
   nytrackstar: anything doing hardware SATA R5 is going to be fucking expensive. The 2320 is a great deal for the performance.
   
   also: PCI-E is dedicated lanes. So putting soemthing in the PCI-E x4 slot doesn't take anything from your SLI setup (which, unless its on an nForce4-SLI32 board is running paired x8 slots, anyway)
   
   
   (ayþenur, Liechtenstein)


5. I strongly believe it isn't multithreaded, but I have no evidence. The tweakers.net review was using a dual-capable board, but with only one CPU. Maybe this was a limitation, maybe not.
   
   nytrackstar: What does "slow" mean? I mean, jeez, be a little more broad...
   
   Let me try the question again. What are you doing with this? Downloading onto it? Bulk storage for media? Video editing? Playing games from it? If you give us some idea of what you're doing with it it'll be easier to recommend.
   
   
   
   
   (irem, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the)


6. sorry for not getting into specifics, the larger will be for bulk storage of media and schoolwork...games will run off the boot drive
   
   
   (ali, Bulgaria)


7. So if it's for media storage, software raid will almost certainly not be an issue. Like I mentioned, on the 1.4 gHz cpu tweakers.net used they showed about 3.5 MB/s per % of CPU used. So if you've got a ~3 gHz cpu, I'd expect ~7 MB/s per % of CPU. Even straight DVD video uncompressed is about 1.2 MB/s. So when you rip the DVD at 16x it'd take about 20 MB/s, or about 3% CPU.
   
   And if you get a dual-core processor, that process will most likely be scheduled to whatever's not doing your main task, so it wouldn't cause things to slow down. Lastly, I hope you're looking into a backup for at least the schoolwork portion of your files. Raid is not a backup.
   
   
   
   
   (mustafa, Turks and Caicos Islands)


8. I have the Highpoint 2220 (PCI-X 8-port SATA-II) and I'm about to post another thread on a conflict I have with SCSI devices... but to answer your question about boot times, the Highpoint BIOS/spin-up/detect process takes about 45 seconds per boot. At least it does for me.
   
   
   (burak, Uganda)


9. i decided on the following:
   
   2x 150 gig Raptors (raid-0) - Boot Drive
   2x 500 gig barracuda's (Raid-1) - music,videos,movies,schoolwork
   1x 500 gig barracuda - MCE tv/radio recordings
   1x 400 gig barracuda - ISO backups of boot drive (norton ghost)
   
   this controller: PROMISE SuperTrak EX8300 PCI-X SATA II RAID Controller
   
   ...that'll leave me with enough storage for now and if i need to expand it i can add another 2x500 in raid-1 for more space...
   
   
   (hüseyin, Taiwan, Province of China)


10. If you have time, before you make this a "production" system, could you run raid 5 benchmarks on this? Nothing big, just IOmeter; I'd love to see how this thing does.
    
    
    
    
    (sema, India)


11. system wont be fully built untill mid-may, i will most certainly run some benchmarks for u once i have it all setup...thanks again for all your help
    
    
    (hasret, Zambia)


12. i'm also looking for a card too. any recommends would be nice =). looking @12-16ports. there was a hotdeal for a 16port 3ware a whileback, shoulda' gotten it, not it's back to the usual price. i have a Promise SX4 now and when it first came out, there was a ton of problem with (google it, you'll probably find many threads), promise didn't fix anything until 1-2 years later. it's OK now, but it's 2late. i've sworn off Promise already. their hardware's nice, but if the software doesn't fix issues (firmware) then what's the point of good hardware? didn't get the 3ware cause i heard they were not as good as they used to be. that leaves LSI Logic, Areca, Highpoint, etc.
    
    need one for PCI-X, HD editing, etc.
    
    
    (ali, Austria)


13. Hmmm. HD editing, you say? What kind of HD? Uncompressed?
    
    Highpoint makes a 16-port card, but I'd stay away from software raid for HD editing - it's too likely to become host-cpu-bound. This means you're pretty much stuck with the $820 3ware or the $930 Areca. I'd strongly recommend the Areca; you can have it on pci express, it's faster, it's got ethernet management (:D) and as far as I'm concerned it's the coolest thing since French Toast. Adaptec also makes a 16-port adapter. Skip it. I don't think LSI makes a 16-port card, and the 8-port ones don't seem to support teaming.
    
    Have you considered a raid 0 (+1?) array? It's a little more for the disks, but it's easier to get the speeds needed for HD out of it, and then you can have the big raid 5/6 array to store all the produced materials on.
    
    
    
    
    (recep, Falkland Islands (Malvinas))


14. yope =).
    
    i thought 3ware was on their way out? i've been reading some of the reviews/rumours and everyone seem to say 3ware's not as good as they used to be, crapped out, etc.?
    
    
    (isa, Benin)


15. 3ware is still good, but they don't appear to have made much progress in past years, and if they don't soon Areca would love to tear them to shreds.
    
    Still have questions unanswered from above. What res/FPS?, uncompressed?, can afford 0+1?, ...
    
    
    
    
    (SELÇUK, Central African Republic)


16. possibly 1080p over SDI from Canon XL H1 =).
    
    
    (özcan, Netherlands)

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