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- Jan 15, 2006
- Messages
- 4,777
While a little on the older side, 3Ware seems to have the best, economical SATA RAID 5 card on the market with its 9500s series. Easily obtained on eBay for about $50 for 4 port. The reason I say this is that I have tried other economical cards such as LSI (Who owns 3Ware now) 150 and 300 series, and Adaptec and have had nothing but problems. First, I hate Adaptec's RAID for a number of reasons. The interface they give you is ridiculous to a professional. It MAKES you initialize any RAID volume you create. What does this mean? If you happen to lose what its called your NVRAM coniguration, yet you remember exactly how it was set, you essentially have to erase the volume to create it. Not so with LSI, where they use MagaRAID which allows you to re-establish the configuration without initialization. Same with 3Ware, but it doesn't use MegaRAID, it uses it's own interface. The problem with LSI products is that they will not allow you to instantiate a volume over 2TB. That is way too small nowadays. 3Ware, I have not seen a limit, although I am using them on a PCI-X 64Bit slot. I have had no problem creating RAIDs up to 8TB. The largest physical drive, however, can only be 2TB, as 3TB reads as 768GB. BUT, they have an 8 port and a 12 port available so do the math and you can possibly be almost up to ~22TB RAID 5. (12 X 2TB - 2) Anything from Vista on up to Win 7 along with Server 2008 R1 and R2 have the drivers that download from Microsoft once you install it. The only problem is that the way the drivers are set up on their page is a little cludgy to find everything that you need. What you want is the FULL CD ISO, called "Complete <newest version> CodeSet Release ISO" from:
**broken link removed**
This has everything you need to mount the online management interface, and also update drivers and firmware. The main problem I find with Adaptec and especially LSI 150 and 300 series, is that they start bursting once they start copying large amounts of data. When I mean bursting, I cant even explain to you how painful it is to copy a 5GB file from one volume to your RAID volume. It slows almost to a halt, then back up for a couple of seconds. In the end copying a 5GB file from one drive to your RAID volume could take as long as 40 minutes. I have tried every setting such as read ahead, etc, and have not been able to solve it. I have reproduced the problem with LSI tech support and they have no answer for it. 3Ware cards on the other hand are fast all the way through, even copying 3TB worth of large or small files. These cards are excellent for home servers and media servers. A word of note, GPT file system is needed to allocate volumes over 2TB, so remember to select GPT when Windows imports the volume to make it usable otherwise Windows will split the volume up into 2TB chunks.
**broken link removed**
This has everything you need to mount the online management interface, and also update drivers and firmware. The main problem I find with Adaptec and especially LSI 150 and 300 series, is that they start bursting once they start copying large amounts of data. When I mean bursting, I cant even explain to you how painful it is to copy a 5GB file from one volume to your RAID volume. It slows almost to a halt, then back up for a couple of seconds. In the end copying a 5GB file from one drive to your RAID volume could take as long as 40 minutes. I have tried every setting such as read ahead, etc, and have not been able to solve it. I have reproduced the problem with LSI tech support and they have no answer for it. 3Ware cards on the other hand are fast all the way through, even copying 3TB worth of large or small files. These cards are excellent for home servers and media servers. A word of note, GPT file system is needed to allocate volumes over 2TB, so remember to select GPT when Windows imports the volume to make it usable otherwise Windows will split the volume up into 2TB chunks.
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