RAID controller $24 + shipping

[TheToddler]

Does the cheaper card have an IDE activity header for the LED? Does anyone know what the difference is between these cards?

 

[uo7]

Originally posted by: Nosferatu
I was looking at symantec's site a little while ago. If I recall correctly. Most of the time, Ghost can not do a clone of a RAID.

ghost

Before you scream that it says ghost 2001, look down under solutions where it says 2003 and below....

Now if anyone does know how to clone a hardware array, I would love to know how....

I use PowerQuest drive image 2002 with windows xp. Works great.

 

[AlexPton]

Hi guys,
I'm a 3 year lurker, and this is what pushed me over the edge to finally post.
Has anybody had any success with this card in a dual-boot windows/linux machine? I jumped on this deal, but can't find drivers in linux for this. I'm using a 2.4.18 kernel.
I'm using RAID level 1. currently, i can mount hde1 or hdf1 to read all my data from my raid array, but i'm not going to even try writing, because i'm pretty sure all transactions from linux to this card are currently not RAID transactions.
If I can't get Windows and Linux to play nice with my RAID configuration (read: i can't implement the raid in OS, must be drivers to the card), then this is not a hot deal for me, especially since I spend 90% of my time in Linux (where I can't do write access).
anybody have any suggestions?
thanks!

 

[Abaddon66]

Sounds screwy, drivers or not, this card should use firmware to shroud the actual disk acess from the os, without drivers, you normally would not be able to access the raw io device, linux, freebsd, solaris, or windows, it doesn't matter. So if you can access the disk, and can read them both seperately, well thats bizarre. I take it the data matches??. First find out what disk is running as the master via the firmware, 0 or 1 or whatever (I am using the card but I haven't entered the firmware yet to take a look at it, using as a 133 adapter in an old computer right now), then mount the other drive as read only. Mount the first drive normally and edit a file (just a simple text file will do, see if the changes are auto propagated to the second drive. If so your fine. If not, the controller should be able to recover on next boot, as it will auto synch both drives.

Good luck.

Oh and as far as the raid levels listed above, just a short correction.

raid 3: drastic improvement over raid 2, beats raid 1 in large I/O, but still horrible in small I/O, 91% space utilization
raid 4: a little better than raid 3, 91% space utilization
raid 5: night and day difference above raid 2,3, and 4, very fast large I/O and a small I/O that is just behind that of raid 1, the parity is spread across all disks, 91% space utilization

The space utilization is actually a function of the number of disks. Minimum of 3 disks required for these levels, utilization for parity is 1/x where x is the number of disks.
So in a 3 disk setup you lose a third of your storage space, in 4 25% and in 5 20%. So on and so forth.
As far as speed goes, raid 5 rairly beets raid 1 in any io, especially if split across controllers, as raid 1 only has to perform a duplicate write to both disks, and can actually perform like a raid 0 when doing reads (aka round robin read from both disks). Of course this is if the raid controller/software offers that feature, and offers the feature that the two disks don't have to wait for each other and approve sync while doing writes. Can't tell you if this controller does that, but since most software raids do..... Anyway raid 5 is slow due to the fact that it has to make a parity calculation for each write, which without dedicated hardware takes major cpu cycles, and will slow down even dedication hardware controllers. In the enterprise it is only used on web servers and such (servers who only read and write rarely and moslty operate from ram). Raid 0+1 is by far the bigest enterprise raid deployment configuration. Raid 0 stripe sets are created, and then these sets are used to form raid 1 mirrors, normally across multiple disk bricks with hot standbys. This way the loss of any disk and even a full chassy will not cause a loss in the raid. Speed and full redundancy without parity calculation, which on a multi terabyte cluster or san could bring a sun starcat to its knees. (ok so this isn't useful to you but at least its a fun fact)

 

[TheToddler]

For anyone who is concerned about the "software vs. hardware" RAID debate, the following is from the conclusions page of Anandtech's mega-RAID roundup a while back:

"If you recall, we showed that all RAID functions, not just the RAID 5 functions, were calculated on the hardware RAID cards. What does this mean in terms of actual performance? Well, it does mean that the system CPU does not have to do as much work. At the same time, it also means that the hardware RAID solutions will perform slower."

"The reason for this is that with the high speed of CPU processors available today, like the Duron 850MHz processor used in this review, the CPUs are able to perform the RAID calculations faster than the hardware RAID coprocessors can. It is true that when moving to RAID 5 the CPU is overburdened with parity bit calculations, but in RAID 0 arrays the CPU has plenty of power to devote to a few simple calculations per clock."

"What does this mean to you? Well, if you are a home computer user looking for only a RAID 0 or RAID 1 configuration, there is absolutely no reason to spend the extra money for a hardware RAID card. In fact, you are actually better off performance wise going with a cheaper software RAID solution."

So there you go. Don't worry about the "software" designation. And for the record, I'm using this card and I can read/write data on the RAID 0 array from a boot floppy. I'm running PowerQuest Image Center software for "ghosting" from a DOS boot and there are absolutely no issues at all.

 

[drewdogg808]

Originally posted by: TheToddler
Does the cheaper card have an IDE activity header for the LED? Does anyone know what the difference is between these cards?

the cheaper one does have a pin pin header for LED (jp 2)....as far as differences go between the cards, the one that sticks out for me is the one year warranty and no end user support for the cheaper one vs. 5 year warranty and support on the higher model. i checked around on the koutech website, and can't find drivers specifically for the IO-PIR133, only the IOFLEX-PIR133 (so no support for the cheaper one). i emailed neutron awhile back and they responded that there was no such thing as the IO-PIR133, and "where did i get my info from?" they said i could call /contact koutech and ask them myself. i did email koutech, but i never got a response. anyway, i never got to use my raid card because i did a watercooling setup and had to lose my hard drive tray in my lian li to put the radiator in, so i don't have room for 2 more drives.

 

[AlexPton]

Originally posted by: Abaddon66
Sounds screwy, drivers or not, this card should use firmware to shroud the actual disk acess from the os, without drivers, you normally would not be able to access the raw io device, linux, freebsd, solaris, or windows, it doesn't matter. So if you can access the disk, and can read them both seperately, well thats bizarre. I take it the data matches??. First find out what disk is running as the master via the firmware, 0 or 1 or whatever (I am using the card but I haven't entered the firmware yet to take a look at it, using as a 133 adapter in an old computer right now), then mount the other drive as read only. Mount the first drive normally and edit a file (just a simple text file will do, see if the changes are auto propagated to the second drive. If so your fine. If not, the controller should be able to recover on next boot, as it will auto synch both drives.

Hi Abaddon, thanks for the response.
I've been pretty busy recently so haven't bothered messing around with it.
I think drivers for normal IDE accesses to this card are supported in Linux, which is why i can mount/read.

I finally got around to trying the experiment, and no luck. writing to the master does not cause the change to be auto-propagated to the second.

I would highly recommend that anybody that is interested in using this card for both Windows and non-Windows machines look to more established vendors like adaptec or promise. of course if you are using this solely in windows, it works great, and if you are using this solely in linux, it sorta works (you use all OS-based raiding... basically the card becomes just a pci ide controller).

talked to silicon images support. besides being extremely rude (and ignoring my first emails) they told me that they were a "hardware company" and were not responsible for the drivers. pretty ridiculous. imagine if "hardware companies" such as ATI or Nvidia refused to release linux drivers? especially for Nvidia, since like Silicon Image, their API is closed.

koutech is no help either. their website is a mess and an insult to anybody who has ever used that newfangled technology known as "hyperlinks". very difficult to navigate their site, and to make it worse, 20% of the links i clicked on were dead. including the one that looked informative entitled "For all Linux supported products information, please click here, and select Linux Zone."

overall, i am one angry customer :|

 

[Research]

The same card is now available for 24.95 bucks at dealsonic.com

Anybody has any experience to narrate? Any failures .. performance problems?

 

[ozone13]

Originally posted by: Research
The same card is now available for 24.95 bucks at dealsonic.com

Anybody has any experience to narrate? Any failures .. performance problems?

I'm the thread originator....and bought the card originally posted here. I'm STILL going strong with this card. Haven't had a single problem with it, performance is excellent (I'm not even using the software it comes with....you can run RAID without it, you just can't change the settings w/o the software unless you go into the bios on the card itself), and am thinking of getting another card for my other system.

 

[Research]

I'm STILL going strong with this card. Haven't had a single problem with it, performance is excellent (I'm not even using the software it comes with....you can run RAID without it, you just can't change the settings w/o the software unless you go into the bios on the card itself), and am thinking of getting another card for my other system.

Thanks for the info! And some research shows that a lot of raid cards (generic like this especially) are made from the Silicon Image company, which makes raid chips for a number of name brands. So I gess this card is good.

However, just wondering, if you can provide a little more detail on the set-up. So you mean that I do not need the software ... just go in the bios, and enable raid for this card? I guess, this card can attach only two hard-drives (both as masters), and then after the raid is enabled in bios, it treats the two drives as one. Right?

 

[Research]

Originally posted by: drewdogg808

Originally posted by: LostHiWay

Originally posted by: drewdogg808
for those who have this card, did you guys get a IO-PIR133 or did you get a IOFLEX-PIR133, like the description says? i just got mine today from neutron, and it's the IO-PIR133....it looks like just an ata133 controller, but some of the description says "optional raid". did i get screwed? the card itself is black, with one ide blue and one white.

You got the a cheaper version of the card. Newegg has both cards.

This is the one you got ($27 shipped)
Image of it

The one you should have got..( $33 shipped)
Image

thats what i figured. i just didn't know if everyone else who ordered it from neutron got the cheaper version or not.
thanks though.

I got quite confused with the cheaper/expensive version stuff of this raid card going on in this thread that I decided wrote an email to the koutech customer service: Here is the reply I got:


Subject: Re: Question about PIR133 RAID
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 09:03:52 -0800

Greetings,

Basically the functions of the cards are all the same. The only difference
is, IO-PIR 133 is made in China, IOFLEX-PIR 133 is made in Taiwan. You
can choose either one, which has all the same functions. If you need
further information on how to install the card, I can send it to you.

Regards,
Martin Chan,
KSI Tech Support

 

[V00DOO]

I may be interested in one for my 2 Maxtor 120GB 8mb cache.

 

[ozone13]

However, just wondering, if you can provide a little more detail on the set-up. So you mean that I do not need the software ... just go in the bios, and enable raid for this card? I guess, this card can attach only two hard-drives (both as masters), and then after the raid is enabled in bios, it treats the two drives as one. Right?

Well, you can actually attach up to 4 devices: a master and slave for each ide. If you're running raid, its best to put each raid device on its own ide, so you would put them each as master on its own ide cable.

The software is really only needed if you want to: a) view status of your raid, b) make raid changes, c) add another raid configuration from within windows....but you can do all that from the bios of the card, so its not necessary to install the software. Windows will treat your raid as one logical device (for each raid configuration).

 

[drewdogg808]

Originally posted by: Research

Originally posted by: drewdogg808

Originally posted by: LostHiWay

Originally posted by: drewdogg808
for those who have this card, did you guys get a IO-PIR133 or did you get a IOFLEX-PIR133, like the description says? i just got mine today from neutron, and it's the IO-PIR133....it looks like just an ata133 controller, but some of the description says "optional raid". did i get screwed? the card itself is black, with one ide blue and one white.

You got the a cheaper version of the card. Newegg has both cards.

This is the one you got ($27 shipped)
Image of it

The one you should have got..( $33 shipped)
Image

thats what i figured. i just didn't know if everyone else who ordered it from neutron got the cheaper version or not.
thanks though.

I got quite confused with the cheaper/expensive version stuff of this raid card going on in this thread that I decided wrote an email to the koutech customer service: Here is the reply I got:


Subject: Re: Question about PIR133 RAID
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 2003 09:03:52 -0800

Greetings,

Basically the functions of the cards are all the same. The only difference
is, IO-PIR 133 is made in China, IOFLEX-PIR 133 is made in Taiwan. You
can choose either one, which has all the same functions. If you need
further information on how to install the card, I can send it to you.

Regards,
Martin Chan,
KSI Tech Support

wow...you actually got a response from koutech, i never heard from them when i emailed awhile back. i know both cards have the same functions, but you should ask if the warranties and driver support are the same (5 vs. 1 year, etc.)

 

[tbrooks40]

Originally posted by: ozone13
Koutech I/O Flex Raid controller for only $24 + shipping.

Ultra DMA (ATA) 133MB/sec data transfer rate
Two independent Ultra ATA/133 channels
Supports up to four (4) IDE devices
Supports RAID function (RAID 0, 1, 0+1)
ATA clock independent from PCI bus
256 Byte FIFO per ATA channel
Large FIFO independent
Supports Ultra DMA 6/5/4/3/2/1, PIO 4/3/2/1/0, DMA 2/1/0 modes
IDE drive types support ATA, Fast ATA-2, EIDE, Ultra ATA/33, Ultra ATA/66, Ultra ATA/100, and Ultra ATA/133
Can share interrupt (IRQ) level with most PCI cards
32-bit 33/66MHz PCI interface
PCI specification v.2.2 compliant
Fully Plug-N-Play compatible
Supports Windows® 95/98/98SE/Me/NT 4.0/2000/XP, and DOS

This is a pretty generic-brand RAID controller, but one that seems to have quite a bit of features. It comes with a 5 year warranty.

she's back - cheaper too - $21 @ Dealsonic... $3.95 ground shipping. is everyone's card still working? anyone with any issues?

 

[doinmybestatlast]

Working - no issues, three months. Bought two more.

 

[tbrooks40]

Originally posted by: doinmybestatlast
Working - no issues, three months. Bought two more.

thanx m8 - gonna pick another up today!

 

[SpideyCU]

At this price, I'm going to get one to run RAID-0 in my Windows box, and another to run RAID-1 in my Linux file server. No need to do separate backups anymore! This a price I really can't ignore anymore.

 

[kevman]

I've had this thing for months now, great card, no problbmes what soever with my 240GIG Raid 0 Volume.

A question had for others with this card, If I have a RAID 0 arrya setup up on this card with each drive connected to the two sepreate channels, can I add NON-RAID drives to the the IDE chain on those RAID'ED drives???


Basically can I use the open IDE connections without having them configured as aa RAID array??