RAID card recommendation

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chronic9

Supreme [H]ardness
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Aug 18, 2004
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Totally new to raid card world,

I understand how raids work, and what can cause them to die.

I bought 4 wd 3tb red during cyber Monday event on amazon. With the intention of raiding them into raid 5. Except I don't know what's the best card for my needs, this array will be for my .iso backups of old discs. And a huge .mkv collection. Pretty much it....

I see that a lot of the lsi cards come with 512mb ram, I am guessing that's enough for my type of raid usage?

Thanks for the help
 
I'm in the same boat you're in, I did all the usual research and read a lot of articles and debates online.

It seems the popular brand is LSI, and you got 2 choices, either a HBA or RAID, obviously you want raid.

You didn't mention price but I'll assume it's within the $500 range +/- $200.

The card I plan to buy is the LSI Megaraid 9631-8i. It has 1 GB of cache, supports 12 Gb/s, PCIe 3.0 so it looks future proof. I think the same card would work for you, it supports up to 8 drives in case you plan to add more in the future, and you can even add more with an expander. You can also accelerate performance safely by adding a BBU.
 
Look for recent LSI or Areca SAS/SATA cards with on board RAM and a BBU.

Although my recommendation is to not use raid for home use especially with only 4 disks. Use individual drives and do backups instead. By the time you factor in the cost of a raid controller like this you can purchase enough $140 4TB disks to do proper backups.
 
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i went with a adaptec 6405.... but then it got lost during shipping... yay :(
 
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