Good & Cheap Raid?

[WyWyWyWy]

Hi all!

Any recommendation on good and dirt cheap raid (1+0) cards?
Remember it has to be dirt cheap... I just don't want to ghost every two months or so (oh and of course some extra performance from raid is always nice )

Thanks!

[Gurm]

Promise.

There are no other RAID cards worth a damn.

Oh, are you talking about REAL RAID? As in SCSI?

Can't help you there, don't know any cheap good ones.

- Gurm

[WyWyWyWy]

Thanks for the info.

Yea I know Promise is the best I can get, but they ain't exactly dirt cheap (their normal IDE controllers are)...

Is Highpoint any good? Pretty cheap they are.

[Dilitante1]

try one of these

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=2061671597

i have one in my server box behind me with 3 4.3 gig drives in RAID5 8)

[Dr Mordrid]

Highpoints are frozen crap on a stick.

For a cheap RAID 0+1 look up a Fasttrak 100 or Fasttrak TX4. Both and therefore selling at a discount vs. current models.

The best Fasttrak offering data redundency right now is the SX4000 RAID5, but it's running about $150 USD +/- and requires 3 drives to set up a very fast RAID5. It can do JBOD, RAID0, RAID1 and RAID0+1 as well, but you can do those cheaper as noted above.

Dr. Mordrid

[efty]

Well I have a HighPoint raid controller. I don't even use it in a raid configuration and it is causing trouble. The computer often freezes when there is intensive HD activity.

[Dr Mordrid]

Like I said

Dr. Mordrid

[RichL]

I'm another victim of Highpoint RAID controllers. My motherboards HPT370 worked fine for at least three days in RAID 0 striped across 2 30gb disks (known good working disks too)
Then the PC died with a BSOD so fatal I had to rebuild and decided not to risk it again.

Promise controllers can be bought from Maplins stores, IIRC its about £50 for a TX2.

[Tempest]

Running two 40 GB Maxtor D740X:s using striping on HighPoint 372... No problems, but performance doesn't exactly blow your mind away.

[WyWyWyWy]

Originally posted by RichL
I'm another victim of Highpoint RAID controllers. My motherboards HPT370 worked fine for at least three days in RAID 0 striped across 2 30gb disks (known good working disks too)
Then the PC died with a BSOD so fatal I had to rebuild and decided not to risk it again.

Promise controllers can be bought from Maplins stores, IIRC its about £50 for a TX2.

TX2 is not a RAID card is it?
If it is then WOOO!! It's 34quid only on Scan!

[Dr Mordrid]

There are two TX2 models; one is a plain PCI IDE controller (Ultra100 or Ultra133 TX2) and the other a RAID (Fasttrak100 TX2). There is also the Fasttrak TX2000 RAID.

Careful....

Dr. Mordrid

[SpiralDragon]

then adaptec ide raid cards are out of the question too since they use the highpoint controlers...

i have a TX2 myself.... works great..... now if only i had some of those WD 200GB 7200RPM 8mb cache HDDs .........

i do freelance nonliniar editing on my machine... in DV 25 and 50 but i only have four of the 40 GB 7200rpm 2mb variants... and not too many customers latly..... dead season..

[bsdgeek]

3Ware Escalades are pretty nice, I use a couple in my BSD boxes.

[WyWyWyWy]

How are promise cards supported in FreeBSD?

[efty]

I am not 100% sure on this but I think all those cheapo raid cards are software raid. I don't know about BSD but in linux you can setup a software raid array and it works quite good and the speed gains are in par with the "hardware" cards.