Need help finding a good raid card

[Ludwigzz]

I need a pci raid card that can handle three raid 1 arrays with 6 sata ports. This is a drawn-out plan of what I want to do

If possible, it would be nice for the raid card to be a pci-e 1x card; but I have two 4x slots and one 16x slot.

 

[marko55]

You've got a few options, but none should involve a "RAID card" that fits in a PCIe x1 slot. That won't be a true RAID card and would have serious bandwidth limitations (only about 500MB/s to your mobo based on PCIe 2.0 which your mobo runs).

Option 1: You can connect your 2 x SSDs to your mobo's SATA ports and run RAID-1 on those two as your boot drive. Then purchase a 4 port dedicated RAID card for the other 4 drives. I recommend taking to ebay and find an LSI 9260-4i (4-port), 9260-8i (8-port), 9266-4i (1GB cache vs 9260's 512MB) or 9266-8i. Don't buy the OEM models (marked as Dell, IBM, etc). ONLY the actual LSI branded cards. I've bought the ones that come straight from China and they work like a charm.

Option 2: Buy one of those LSI cards & run all three arrays from it (8-port card required of course). Thing is, you don't want to use the cache on the RAID card for your SSD RAID so there's no reason to use the card for that array, except if your mobo fries you can forklift the RAID card and all the drives & just plug it in to another mobo & everything is still there like nothing happened.

You'll want/need to use your 2nd x16 slot for the dedicated RAID card. They all use 8 lanes from a PCIe slot.

In regards to the two RAID 1s for storage, if you haven't already got those drives (2 diff models), I would DEFINITELY do 4 x HDDs in a RAID-5 on the dedicated card with write-back enabled. If you have 4 x 1TB drives that will give you 3TB usable and read/write performance of 3 drives (figure around 550-600MB/s with Seagates or Toshiba). These are real world numbers (I'm doing it right now), and that's only for large writes. When disk & RAID card cache are used for smaller writes you're talking 4GB/s writes. The LSI card will allow you to force write-back even without a battery on the card, which some other RAID card manufacturers won't allow.

WD's are overrated IMO. Their price-to-performance (and quality) are lower than other drives out there. Seagates are some of the fastest and cheapest but have a high failure rate. Hitachis (HGST) cost more (except OEM bare drives), their performance is a little lower but they're very reliable. Toshibas fall pretty nicely in the middle. Their 2-4TB drives benchmark out of the box with the Seagates (upwards of 200MB/s read & write) and have good reliability (they actually own Hitachi & share manufacturing plants). In the RAID-5 in my home rig I use Seagates as my data is backed up anyway and I enjoy the performance. In the workstations I build professionally I use a lot of Toshibas and some Hitachis (mainly in large arrays when building servers).

 

[popatim]

Is something wrong with your motherbds ports or are they all full?

 

[marko55]

Careful, some motherboards will only let you create one RAID volume. Unfortunately many manuals won't tell you that but contacting the manufacturer will get you the correct answer.

 

[Ludwigzz]

You've got a few options, but none should involve a "RAID card" that fits in a PCIe x1 slot. That won't be a true RAID card and would have serious bandwidth limitations (only about 500MB/s to your mobo based on PCIe 2.0 which your mobo runs).

Option 1: You can connect your 2 x SSDs to your mobo's SATA ports and run RAID-1 on those two as your boot drive. Then purchase a 4 port dedicated RAID card for the other 4 drives. I recommend taking to ebay and find an LSI 9260-4i (4-port), 9260-8i (8-port), 9266-4i (1GB cache vs 9260's 512MB) or 9266-8i. Don't buy the OEM models (marked as Dell, IBM, etc). ONLY the actual LSI branded cards. I've bought the ones that come straight from China and they work like a charm.

Option 2: Buy one of those LSI cards & run all three arrays from it (8-port card required of course). Thing is, you don't want to use the cache on the RAID card for your SSD RAID so there's no reason to use the card for that array, except if your mobo fries you can forklift the RAID card and all the drives & just plug it in to another mobo & everything is still there like nothing happened.

You'll want/need to use your 2nd x16 slot for the dedicated RAID card. They all use 8 lanes from a PCIe slot.

In regards to the two RAID 1s for storage, if you haven't already got those drives (2 diff models), I would DEFINITELY do 4 x HDDs in a RAID-5 on the dedicated card with write-back enabled. If you have 4 x 1TB drives that will give you 3TB usable and read/write performance of 3 drives (figure around 550-600MB/s with Seagates or Toshiba). These are real world numbers (I'm doing it right now), and that's only for large writes. When disk & RAID card cache are used for smaller writes you're talking 4GB/s writes. The LSI card will allow you to force write-back even without a battery on the card, which some other RAID card manufacturers won't allow.

WD's are overrated IMO. Their price-to-performance (and quality) are lower than other drives out there. Seagates are some of the fastest and cheapest but have a high failure rate. Hitachis (HGST) cost more (except OEM bare drives), their performance is a little lower but they're very reliable. Toshibas fall pretty nicely in the middle. Their 2-4TB drives benchmark out of the box with the Seagates (upwards of 200MB/s read & write) and have good reliability (they actually own Hitachi & share manufacturing plants). In the RAID-5 in my home rig I use Seagates as my data is backed up anyway and I enjoy the performance. In the workstations I build professionally I use a lot of Toshibas and some Hitachis (mainly in large arrays when building servers).

I already have the one WD Blue HDD, but not the reds nor the 2nd ssd. I just saw two 2tb WD reds listed on craigslist for $120, and that caught my eye about making a RAID system. About the RAID 5 solution plus plugging the ssds into the motherboard, how would I go about configuring the RAID controller? I would assume I would have to boot into it from the boot menu, but after I've configured the RAID, would I still have to boot to the RAID controller, then the ssd raid? Or would it automatically initialize the array when it's started?

 

[marko55]

Grab your mobo manual from gigabyte.com & head to page 56.

- Set your OnChip SATA Type to "RAID" (I believe you'll set the OnChip SATA Port4/5 Type to same as....."
- There's some additional steps IF you have Win8 x64. I'd probably skip those.
- Reboot & key yourself in to the RAID setup utility (looks Ctrl+F at some point during bootup). Page 61 of the manual
- Create a RAID 1 logical volume with your two SSDs. I'd stick to a 64KB Stripe.

After reboot what "should" happen is in your bios's boot priority menu you should see your logical RAID volume as a choice of boot hard drives, which you'll choose.

The real fun begins when you install windows....you'll need the RAID driver from Gigabyte's website, for your mobo, on a thumb drive during the windows install. This is necessary when you reach the OS install's point of choosing what hard drive you want to install to. It likely will not see your RAID volume, so you'll have to browse to your thumb drive to load the RAID driver and then it will see it and you can install Windows to it.

In regards to the PCIe RAID card, just know that its going to increase your boot time by upwards of 30 seconds depending on the card. This is because when you first fire up your machine the RAID card is initialized first, before your mobo's BIOS. This is so your BIOS can see any logical volumes presented by the RAID card so you can choose to boot from them if desired.

Another option if you're interested in making your life a little easier: Just use one SSD for your OS drive. Then just use your mobo's SATA ports 0-3 to set up a RAID-5 of 4 spin disks. Now (if you use 2TB drives) you've got a 6TB volume presented to Windows for your storage that will pretty much have equivalent performance of a single low-end SSD, and you don't have to mess around with re-installing windows. Note that you'll need write-back capability for the RAID-5 volume to have decent write performance and I don't think Windows Storage Spaces in Win8 can do this (not positive). Point is, you want some sort of hardware/chipset based RAID controller to drive your RAID-5 like your mobo or a PCIe RAID card.

 

[popatim]

I missed the motherbd in the sig, the 990fx series should be able to handle 4 raid1 arrays. I had 4 raid0's on my gigabyte 890fx board.