Netcell Syncraid Questions

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a573573

Limp Gawd
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Jan 6, 2008
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I recently came across a Netcell Syncraid SR5100B Raid controller 64Bit And have a few questions.

I may get a great deal on this, and first was wondering if it was going to be a Good Deal really or not. I see it has XOR and onboard ram already so I assume that is a plus.

I would like to know if anyone knows if this will work in vista? It is a No Driver needed type of card, uses windows IDE drivers

I would also like to know what type of performance hit would I take using a 64 bit PCI card in a 32bit slot (I assume that is what Intel P35 boards have by the looks of it)

And if it would be faster then onboard raid using RAID 0. I assume it would be here, but since it was built for raid 3 and 5 I wasnt sure.

The main site for netcell is gone now, and I know xfx joined them or bought them a while ago. I did find this site though, with some information, and paritally usable links as well
Code: 
http://www.geotopia.com/netcell/products_overview.html

Overall, would it be worth the cash compared to onboard raid if it is priced under $50, and used in my system?
 
Nobody knows any info, or is this the wrong section for this type of question??

Thanks
 
I googled it and did not come up with much. This thread here at the [H] was the #1 link from google.

What is Netcell Syncraid SR5100B ???

Is it software raid on an external card? If so, why.... when you can get onboard raid?

Sorry... I can't help much.
 
Ya, not much info since it is old, I did find the homepage for it but they are also down so here is a homepage kinda for it
http://www.geotopia.com/netcell/products_overview.html

No it is hardware Raid with XOR processor, not much info to that effect here
Ebay Item#
110243529440

Yeah I have onboard RAID, with a GA-P35-DS4 just thought this seemed so cheap since it was a older brand it may be faster for very little money

The brand was bought out by XFX, and they cards as you know are very $$$
 
IIRC, the Netcell was RAID 3 only, and very fast for it's time. http://techreport.com/articles.x/9008

as for drivers etc, I have no clue, I expect no Vista support at all but it may still work.

RAID 0 needs no hardware as it doesn't actually RAID, it is just an AID and really a dumb thing to do in my opinion, but even the most expensive RAID card will be no faster than onboard in RAID 0 if you don't count the cache. (not redundant)
 
Ahh so a waste of time and money then eh?

It does not need drivers it uses windows IDE drivers was another plus of the product

What do you mean RAID 0 is no faster on a card? I see many benchmarks with way higher burst rates and reaq/write times with cards

It does Raid 0, see my link above. And with it's own processor wouldnt this be faster then onboard for sure?
 
a573573 said:
Ahh so a waste of time and money then eh?

It does not need drivers it uses windows IDE drivers was another plus of the product

What do you mean RAID 0 is no faster on a card? I see many benchmarks with way higher burst rates and reaq/write times with cards

It does Raid 0, see my link above. And with it's own processor wouldnt this be faster then onboard for sure?
Click to expand...

With RAID 0 the onboard processor will be doing nothing at all, zip zero nada. If the card has onboard cache, that will improve burst rates etc. But that is just the cache.

And I really don't get why people do RAID 0 on desktop computers. Unless you are doing video editing and using that as a scratch drive there really is no significant advantage to RAID 0 over single drives, and the disadvantage of increasing the likelyhood of losing all your data.
 
I was looking into a NetCell a few months ago (PNY sold them under the S-Cure name, IIRC). Performance is lacking, and from what I remember they only ran RAID3- I was specifically looking for level 5. I can't find anything now, but I don't remember being impressed with ANY of their benchmark results- RAID 0 or 3.

I may have missed it, but are you planning on using an IDE or SATA version of it? Off the top of my head, the controller was only released in IDE, and any manufacturers with SATA versions had onboard converters for each port. This has caused problems on some of my installs in the past, usually with Linux distros where IDE->SATA latency issues would cause an install to hang/corrupt.

I think the NetCell engine was made to be cost-effective, not high-performance. The good news for you is that you won't see much loss in a 32-bit slot. The bad news is, I'd recommend just sticking to the onboard controller. If nothing else, think about it- NetCell doesn't exist any more. Let's say your controller dies (how old would you guess it is by now?)- even though your drives are fine, the controller is so unique and proprietary you'll never be able to migrate it to a new RAID host; you'll lose the data in your array without ever losing a drive. On 680, if your board fries you can migrate to 780 without issue. The same is true with Intel chipsets, because most of their controllers maintain some level of backward-compatibility.
 
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