Hardwae raid

[FatBastard]

Hi all.

I am in an urgent need of a hardware raid pci , pciX card.

requirements:
1. Honest to god hardware raid (0,1 should be fine).
(None of that Matrix or Marvel "Hardware assisted" crap that comes with intel 975x boards.)
1.1 No drivers, All is done in card's bios level
1.1.1 NO DRIVERS, ALL IS DONE IN THE CARD'S BIOS LEVEL
2. sata II.
3. Reasonable pricing.
4. Advice based on personal experience is appreciated the most, as I can google with the best of them.

Thanks a million

FB

[Technoid]

Everything fails at point 1.1 & 1.1.1 since those devices are generally rare and expensive as hell, therefore negating point 3 & 4

[FatBastard]

Define "Expensive all hell" .... I can spend as much as 350$. for 400$ the card better do my laundry as well as raiding.

[Jammrock]

Define "Expensive all hell" .... I can spend as much as 350$. for 400$ the card better do my laundry as well as raiding.

There is also the question of "how many hard drives." That is also a large factor.

But yeah, chances of finding a SATA II hardware RAID controller that doesn't need drivers are slim to none. Unless by "no drivers" you mean all the RAID level stuff is handled on the card BIOS and all you need to do on the OS side is install the controller driver.

Speaking of which, what OS will you be running?

[FatBastard]

I have two 250 GB drives. I want to run RAID 1. I mean I need a card with a OnBoard CPU and Memory, that will reflect a single drive to the OS.

I am running (on that machine) CentOs 5.0. I have configured software raid (mdadm), it worked fine, but I am not so pleased with the performance and moment.

[az]

"Cheap" (i. e. three-figure) hardware RAID cards are not really faster than today's software RAIDs.

[FatBastard]

a less impotent (for me) thing is IO time, though for my type of usage a software raid will be considerably slower then a Hardware one. The management is also an issue. I don't want to maintain two boot loaders, and some maintenance scripts etc.

cheap hardware raids, are not really hardware. the OS driver does all the heavy lifting, but thats hardly what I'm after.

[az]

I know what you mean, that was what I referred to as software RAIDs. I meant there are cards with chips that do the RAIDing in hardware, but the cheap cards with them aren't much faster than those pseudo-hardware cards or OS-level software RAID.

What type of usage, if I may ask? If it involves lots of random access and IO time is more important than transfer rates, try Flash storage. There are adaptors to connect CF cards to IDE ports (because CF cards are IDE devices).

[FatBastard]

Its gonna be used as an Xplanner, svn, cruise control , word press machine. the ant builds I'm gonna run there use up all the Q6600 power (and then some) and write MBs of serialized object while running. but thats beside the point, all I need is redundancy, and easy, fast recovery (so If something happens while I'm away I can keep drinking, and let some other guy save the day).

[schmosef]

My motherboard has that. It's an Asus P5W DH Deluxe. The feature is called "ASUS EZ-Backup":

ASUS EZ-Backupâ„¢
Others guarantee your hard-drive, EZ-Backup guarantees your data on the hard-drive.
No driver, no configuration, just plug and play RAID to backup your data instantaneously. Exclusive to ASUS EZ-Backupâ„¢, users can utilize SATA2 technology to arrange RAID1 (default) or RAID0 system without BIOS or any other setup. EZ-Backupâ„¢ is ideal for anyone who wishes to secure the data on the hard-drive but doesn't want the hassle of complicated software configuration. EZ-Backupâ„¢ looks after your data for you.

I'm sure that other (newer) Asus motherboards will have this features as well.

I use it to RAID0 two 150GB WD Raptor hard drives on my work PC. It's magically delicious.

[Taz]

Your looking at cards from 3Ware (9550SX-4LP/9550SX-8LP/9650SE-4LPML/9650SE-8LPML), LSI (MegaRAID SATA 300-4XLP/300-8XLP) or Promise (SuperTrak EX4350/EX83x0)

[schmosef]

Just to be clear, there is an optional system tray util to moditor RAID health but there are no drivers.

The main system bios sees the RAID array as 1 drive. Windows sees it as "External Disk 0".

I've installed 32 bit and 64 bit versions both Windows XP Pro and Vista Ultimate on this PC. So far no issues with OS compatibility.

[FatBastard]

Your looking at cards from 3Ware (9550SX-4LP/9550SX-8LP/9650SE-4LPML/9650SE-8LPML), LSI (MegaRAID SATA 300-4XLP/300-8XLP) or Promise (SuperTrak EX4350/EX83x0)

Cheers man.
thanks to everybody

FB

[Gurm]

I can personally vouch that the MegaRAID cards ROCK under Red Hat ES and Windows. I would imagine they are equally fab under whatever flavor of LinSux you are Lusing.

[The PIT]

I can personally vouch that the MegaRAID cards ROCK under Red Hat ES and Windows. I would imagine they are equally fab under whatever flavor of LinSux you are Lusing.

Err now you're being hopeful. I bet the bottom dollar thay won''t work with all flavours of Linux.