On Wednesday 07 May 2008 12:08:15 pm Florin Iucha wrote: > On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 11:28:42AM -0500, tclug at b-o-b.homelinux.com wrote: > > Hello, and a good day to you all. Forgive me for not doing my research > > up front, but can anyone recommend a good SATA raid pci card. > > Richard, > > You need to define: 'good', 'raid' and 'price'. Then pick two 8^) > > If you want real RAID, you need to go to 3WARE, Areca, Hightpoint, > Adaptec or LSI Logic, and cough up $100 or more per port. But you get > hardware raid, battery backup for the cache, better management, maybe > some extra checksumming. > > If you want decent host-based RAID you can try the Addonics stuff. > They have a nice line of external SATA enclosures and multi-port > cards. They have 4-port RAID for around $100, either internal or > external. > > If you want cheap, go with a JBOD controller and use the Linux > software RAID implementation. > > Cheers, > florin A 32-bit 33mhz PCI bus is a horrible place to hang hard drive controllers off of. I'm not even sure you can find more than two port pci controllers, let alone with RAID capability. In PCI-X or PCI-e you can definitely get in the game for less than $100/port, ala the 3ware 9550/9650. If I recall my Highpoint 2300 was under $200 for 4 ports some time ago, but it has no battery capability. It does have real management and all the features of a real controller, including in-OS OCR/OLRM. PCI-e though. If you're stuck with 32 bit PCI slots I'd get a plain SATA controller and use linux's software RAID. Performance is going to be limited by the bus anyways. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel PGP: 8A48 EF36 5E9F 4EDA 5A8C 11B4 26F9 01F1 27AF AECB -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 195 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part. Url : http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20080507/b4051a09/attachment.pgp