Recommend good RAID6 with BBU PCI-X or PCIe please?

winstontj

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Apr 4, 2009
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Hello,
I have spent the last few days searching on Google and simply am stumped.

I'm looking for a 6 or 8 port RAID card that is HW RAID and capable of RAID6 plus it MUST have a BBU (Battery Backup).

I have a budget cap of $500.

I also have both PCIe and PCI-X slots - and the connections into this data repository will be throttled at 10mbps at the NICs so I'm not overly concerned with speed and I/O performance.

I'm hoping someone can either recommend me a good used/older (eBay) PCI-X card -OR- talk me out of PCI-X and recommend a decent PCIe card.

Am I going to regret going PCI-X vs. PCIe? Is there really that much difference between the speeds? I have a spare PCI-X slot in the machine and I know that going forward I'm not going to have any hardware that may want to use that slot - on the other hand, I'm running out of PCIe slots. My thinking is that the PCI-X interface is older and should be cheaper (as well as slower) but I could possibly get a better quality card for less money - is that true?

This is going into a 3U chassis mounted sideways so full or low profile - I have space for full-height.

Thx for replies!
 

winstontj

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HDD are all SATA, Servers are various - I have two Dell T7500 workstations that I'm testing with (http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/precision-t7500/pd) and I have a few 3U Dell and Super Micro chassis that are very similar/comparable to the T7500 - all the boxes have dual-socket 5680 Xeon cpus, the 3u's have space for 8-16 hdd while the T7500 has 8, etc. so they are pretty similar just easier (and quieter) to test on the Dell workstations than a rack mount unit.

All of my slots are full-height (but can use low profile as well if needed).

Thx.
 

winstontj

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its a bit complicated but i'm looking for 8-10 cards total. Some will manage HDD that act as a data repository (with 2TB HDD) and others will do similar but also be the base underlying storage for VMs.

The largest array will be a storage repository which will be throttled back to 10mb/sec to most users - but not administrators. I'll advertise 10mb but this is all on gig or 10g networks... or in some cases smaller data repositories will reside within the same ESXi host and both either be throttled way down (in some cases 5k/sec) or jacked up to a full 10G throughput.

So BBU isn't required in every instance but I like to standardize my HW so that I can keep 1-2 spares of a single card rather than have 1-2 spares of multiple different cards.

Make sense?