why are some raid adapters $50 and others $500?

[ThePiston]

I'm in the market for an add-in raid card. Some I see run $50 and others are $500 or more. Why is that? Is it that some have the hardware onboard to decode the bits and others use the CPU?

 

[RebateMonger]

High end RAID cards have built-in high speed caches and processors devoted to RAID. Some have battery backups to maintain the cache if the power goes out. These are mostly custom processors that are costly to design and produce.

The high-end cards are sold to a different market than the inexpensive cards and those customers are willing to pay the substantial price difference for higher performance and better disk management.

 

[ThePiston]

fair enough. Anyone point me in the direction of a consumer-grade model? All I need is a raid that I can take to another mobo when needed... nothing fancy like the pro stuff.

 

[RebateMonger]

You didn't specify what type of RAID array you want to use. RAID 0 or RAID 1 doesn't require much of a card to get "reasonable" performance. If you want to use RAID 5 (whcih I don't use any more), the product selection will be more limited.

 

[ThePiston]

Raid 1. I just don't want to use onboard in case I need to move the array to another mobo that doesn't have same chip.

 

[Keitero]

Anything but Promise will do you fine. I've own several Promise cards over the years, they work, but then again they don't. For all the troubles I've had with them, I've been going more towards the higher end cards such as Adaptec and 3ware. But for a simple RAID 0/1, a SI based card (PCI/PCI-E x1) will do you just fine. There are tons of them on newegg, you just have to know how many ports you want on them.

 

[mooseracing]

Perc 5/i is the best price/performance right now and handles SAS/SATA drives.

 

[Viper GTS]

PERC 5's are great cards for the money, I got one for $100 here with cache & BBU.

People seem to have caught on to them though & they go for $200+ on ebay now (and typically server pulls with no backplate).

Viper GTS

 

[ThePiston]

where can I find these? not coming up on the egg

 

[Viper GTS]

Ebay or FS/T forums (such as the one here) are your best bet. New they run $500+, straight from Dell was nearly $800 the last time I checked.

There are lots of them on ebay in the $200-250 range.

Viper GTS

 

[mooseracing]

I picked up my last one on ebay for $120. You will have to make a bracket or take it off of something for a slot in the back. The Perc cards aren't mounted in PCI slot on Dell servers. In total I spent about $200 for the card, 256 cache, fannout cable, and new BBU.

These cards perform at least as good ifnot better than a $300-500 card depending on which. Also, IIRC they have abottleneck around 300-400MB.

If you need more speed check out the Perc 6, but it is pricier.

 

[skriefal]

If cost is a concern you could simply use the built-in software RAID provided by Windows XP, 2003, Linux, etc. It'll move been motherboards or computers without issue, and performance is usually quite good. Dedicated hardware controllers -- real ones, not the cheapie fake ones -- will perhaps be a bit better, but likely not enough that you'd notice.

 

[citsacras]

i can't speak much for software raid on windows, since i only raid at the server. but software raid in linux at least is as fast or faster than hardware raid in most cases, and i would expect similar performance from windows. it will take some CPU cycles but it's not really a heavy load. with OS level raid your disks should be portable regardless of what motherboard you use.

the big advantage of hardwares of hardware raid are:
booting from raid device
portable to other platforms if using same model raid controller
write cache with battery backup unit

you really need to be using a BBU or at least a UPS with raid 5.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: ThePiston
fair enough. Anyone point me in the direction of a consumer-grade model? All I need is a raid that I can take to another mobo when needed... nothing fancy like the pro stuff.

The PNY S-Cure 5-port SATA raid cards are the cheapest hardware raid cards that I know of. Their raid management GUI only works under XP though, not under Vista, and the company that made them went under, so no more updates to the software.

The RAID array itself will work under any OS, because it looks like an IDE controller to the OS, it doesn't even need drivers!

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