Hardwae raid

[Jammrock]

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

I found something for you:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822102002

As long as you have eSATA, even if you install the eSATA PCI card, all the drivers are built in to the OS...hopefully. Anyway, 2 drive enclosure that can do RAID 0 or 1 from hardware built into the box. Not the most powerful RAID out there, but cheap and to the point. Check out the other Thecus boxes, they have some bigger, better options, but this is the cheapest.

[DGhost]

ahhh, kinda. the question is who's chipset is on the eSATA card? and how well, exactly, is it supported?

[Jammrock]

http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=4817

Silicon Image 3512 for the bundled card, no specs on what they use internally, but I would bet another Silicon Image chip or two. All of the Thecus products I have seen get pretty good reviews.

[DGhost]

probably. i wouldn't use a Si3512 for the life of me though. i saw a pretty good performance improvement going from that chipset to even the older nForce3 250 SATA controllers.

like i was getting at before, I would still just go with the ICH7/8-R soft raid capability. the 2.6 kernel tree has native support for drive mappings, and the performance impact of Raid 0/1 on a quad core processor would be negligable. you would see much better disk access times and it is still a hell of a lot cheaper.

[Jammrock]

Which would be fine if everyone had an Intel-based mobo with an ICH7/8-R with soft RAID and a quad-core processor. For those of us with a laptop we don't have a lot of choice.

[DGhost]

but then again you likely won't have an eSATA port and certainly won't have a PCI/PCIe slot to add one. You would be stuck with USB + external power brick. Personally, if I was going for raid and not just an external hard drive, i would invest in an NAS box instead of an eSATA/USB box. reusing the connection, accessable by multiple computers at the same time, and you should have lower CPU utilization to boot.

anyways. the ICH7/8R and Quad proc is in reference to the original topic of the thread.

[az]

Well, Express Cards are PCIe. Or USB, depending on what the manufacturer chooses to use.

[Jammrock]

I have an expresscard slot. Addonics makes a full featured eSATA card with RAID support for $56 USD. I'll be ordering on on Monday

[az]

Does it use the PCIe or the USB part of the ExpressCard standard? Unfortunately I don't know how to tell these apart visually, if at all possible.

[DGhost]

why i'm not a huge fan of this option: on a laptop, you are talking about a dedicated card to drive a box that requires it's own power brick as well... not exactly portable. You are going to be tethered.

it kinda negates the inherit benefits of using a laptop in the first place.

i have a Windows Home Server box in my closet acting as an NAS. I can access it from any computer on the network, via wired or wireless. That includes the desktop and the two laptops. Laptops can roam on battery and still access information off of it, albeit at a lower speed due to the wireless.

oh yeah, i didn't have to spend $50 to get either of the laptops to access it

oh, and as a heads up, those Addonics cards use a Si3132 PCIe SATA-II controller. It's probable that they are PCIe native. They are PCIe native. Just poked my nose into the drivers

[Jammrock]

Does it use the PCIe or the USB part of the ExpressCard standard? Unfortunately I don't know how to tell these apart visually, if at all possible.

Both. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard ... http://www.expresscard.org/web/site/qa.jsp

@Dghost: The RAID is not for portability. My company requires laptops for all employees so we can work on the spot no matter where we are. However, I am also taking over some virtualization and deployment projects that will require more HDD space and power than a laptop hard drive can handle. Granted, I could get a Falcon or other high end laptop with 3 hard drives and run an internal RAID, but we don't have a budget for a $7000 laptop...unfortunately.

And while I'd like to build a NAS, and will for my home with WHS next year, I'm doing heavy virtualization with multiple virtual servers and server OS distribution, so I want the fastest connection I can get my hands on without spending a fortune on SAS or SCSI. That leaves me with SATA II with an ExpressCard over X1 PCIe (2.5 GB/s) without TCP/IP overhead.

[DGhost]

that sucks. definately a bad bind to be in. You would think that your company would actually invest in workstations - i'm sure the difference in performance it would grant would offset any increase in cost. realistically, it would likely be cheaper to have higher performing workstations though.

[az]

Both. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExpressCard ... http://www.expresscard.org/web/site/qa.jsp

The standard allows for cards to use either interface (or both), they don't have to use both.

[Jammrock]

that sucks. definately a bad bind to be in. You would think that your company would actually invest in workstations - i'm sure the difference in performance it would grant would offset any increase in cost. realistically, it would likely be cheaper to have higher performing workstations though.

You'd have to understand the dynamics of my compnay, but trust me, laptops are really the best bet with our situation. Though there are rumors that some people might start getting workstations and laptops, which would be nice. But that probably won't happen until further down the road once the company has grown some more.

In any event, I don't need the RAID setup to be portable. I only need it when I am at home doing my testings, so portability is not an issue. I just need raw speed.