Upgrading - Raid card recommendation?

D

danks

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 3, 2005
Messages
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I currently have an external sans digital raid enclosure with 5 seagate 3tb 7200rom drives in raid5 and connected via esata. It was mainly used to store larger files, cheap solution, but I recently consolidated some drives in my system and have been using the array for pretty much everything else besides the OS. With more i/o hits now I'm noticing this thing doesnt really cut it and I'm looking to get a good controller.

I was looking at the LSI 9265-8i or the Adaptec 6805... Most reviews I'm reading lean towards the LSI especially with SSD but I only plan on using HDs so I'm not sure if its worth the extra money. Basically looking to get the best performance I can out of a raid5 or maybe raid6 array. Can anyone recommend one with this type of setup?
 
I upgraded a while back from a perc5 to a ibm m5015 (aka lsi 9260-8i). I've been happy with it, it's much faster than the perc, I can copy iso's from my ssd laptop to a 4 drive raid 5 array at wire speed (around 110MB/s) for just about anything (up to 4gb, haven't moved anything larger than that).
 
danks said:
I currently have an external sans digital raid enclosure with 5 seagate 3tb 7200rom drives in raid5 and connected via esata. It was mainly used to store larger files, cheap solution, but I recently consolidated some drives in my system and have been using the array for pretty much everything else besides the OS. With more i/o hits now I'm noticing this thing doesnt really cut it and I'm looking to get a good controller.

I was looking at the LSI 9265-8i or the Adaptec 6805... Most reviews I'm reading lean towards the LSI especially with SSD but I only plan on using HDs so I'm not sure if its worth the extra money. Basically looking to get the best performance I can out of a raid5 or maybe raid6 array. Can anyone recommend one with this type of setup?
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How many drives do you see yourself expanding to in the next 12-18 months? How much are you looking to spend? What OS are you running? I am definately not a fan of Adaptec HBA's, My first preference is Areca, with LSI as second.
 
mwroobel said:
How many drives do you see yourself expanding to in the next 12-18 months? How much are you looking to spend? What OS are you running? I am definately not a fan of Adaptec HBA's, My first preference is Areca, with LSI as second.
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I don't see myself going any higher than 6 drives, maybe 7 if I wanted to do a hot spare. Trying not to spend more than $700. Running win7 64bit. I havent read much on the Areca controllers, how about the arc-1882i?
 
danks said:
I don't see myself going any higher than 6 drives, maybe 7 if I wanted to do a hot spare. Trying not to spend more than $700. Running win7 64bit. I havent read much on the Areca controllers, how about the arc-1882i?
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The 1882i is one of the best RAID HBAs on the market today. I have a whole spectrum of their cards at home and work. The 1882i will give you 8 ports out of the box, and if you add an expander or two dozens more. I would definately recommend going RAID6 as opposed to RAID5+Hotspare. This way you could survive 2 failures without downtime. If the R5+HS had 2 failures prior to the rebuild, you would be down.
 
mwroobel said:
The 1882i is one of the best RAID HBAs on the market today. I have a whole spectrum of their cards at home and work. The 1882i will give you 8 ports out of the box, and if you add an expander or two dozens more. I would definately recommend going RAID6 as opposed to RAID5+Hotspare. This way you could survive 2 failures without downtime. If the R5+HS had 2 failures prior to the rebuild, you would be down.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info, the 1882i looks like the best bet for me. I especially like they included a fan, always had a problem with heat on LSI boards in the past.
 
I have the LSi 9265-8i running on 8x 2TB Hitachi SATA drives and love it, read and write speed is blazing fast on RAID 5 and 6, about as fast as the RAID 0 and RAID 10. I bought a $6.00 Sunon 30mm x 10mm 12v High Speed Fan and mount it on top of the heatsink, underload temperature stay between 49~52C'. :cool:
 
If all you are using are spinners in raid 5 then the IBM 5014 or 5015 (800Mhz PowerPC) as well as the Adaptec 5000 series can be had on ebay for $175-$350 bucks.

I use an Adaptec 5805 which has a 1.2Ghz Dual Intel processor and plenty of cache. You will need to buy a small 35mm 8-10k rpm fan and attach it to the heat sink.
 
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