Consumer raid cards with slicing

[xen111]

Slicing a raid array means taking a portion of each disk and creating an array out of that, which is presented to the OS as one drive;

you can then have say 3 arrays on the same set of disks, e.g. 3 RAID 10 arrays at once over 4 disks.

What brands support this?

I know Intel does (is supposed to)
AMD in the 780G chipset supported 2 slices but has unreliable software support and frequently dropped a disk for no reason

Delock informed me their cards support a maximum of one array
Startech more clearly informed me their cards do not support extra arrays
Dawicontrol probably does not support it.

HighPoint (RocketRaid) does support it.

Hardware RAID card vendors supposedly all support it.

Are you aware of any information on this issue?

 

[RealBeast]

Don't waste your time with RAID unless you are willing to spend enough to get a decent card: Adaptec/Areca/LSI. All support multiple arrays of any sort. Motherboard RAID is just a heartache -- any bios hiccup can break the array.

Depending on what you are doing, usually Windows spanning or stripping is better than a cheap card.

 

[xen111]

Don't waste your time with RAID unless you are willing to spend enough to get a decent card: Adaptec/Areca/LSI. All support multiple arrays of any sort. Motherboard RAID is just a heartache -- any bios hiccup can break the array.

I just want to have the info so I can decide for myself you know.

I know AMD was completely unworkable, Intel is supposed to be better, but I'm not gonna do that.

This particular system had a very specific need and I can even only use PCIe x1 or PCI, the need was not so much performance as to divide 4 drives up into 3.

I can get second hand PCI cards from the types of vendors you mention but they all feel a bit dirty,
the only alternative is a PCIe x1 card, but not many have 4 ports (only older cq. sata 2 ones),

and the only brand probably having RAID 10 support is HighPoint, but the only reasonable card they have is 2 port which needs a port multiplier, there aren't many available.

 

[USAFRet]

I'm just wondering..what is the use case for this?

 

[xen111]

I wanted to reproduce an earlier physical disk setup with 3 harddisks that I lost due to some reasons,

but this time as a "virtual" thing projected from RAID while having some performance and redundancy boost.

I want to get back to that place I was before for.... reasons so that I can progress from there again...

But repurchasing the exact same setup is folly, that's no progress.

So my RAID had the purpose of creating 3 virtual disks.

Now, this is already 2½ years in the past, but I never got very far due to AMD's inability to do what I needed, the consumer x1 card that I could use was rather expensive, the PCI second hand cards felt rather dirty and I lost the system itself due to other reasons so I haven't been dealing with it...

 

[xen111]

Now I remember..... the card most applicable was the RocketRAID 2300, and it was still for sale back then but rather expensive for me, and I would have gotten around to it had I not destroyed something else ;-).

But at a later date I couldn't get it second hand in my country....... hmm.......

HighPoint is also rather shabby with driver support for "discontinued products" but it's not like their "non-discontinued" product offering is so large.....