RAID 5 advice

[Doddsy]

Just wanting a little advice on RAID5 controller cards. I'm going to be building a file server and want a bit of safety for it so I'm planning on RAID5. Just wondering people's opinions on which cards I should be looking at (bearing in mind I'm a poor student).

Tbh I was looking at a sil 3114 based card from dabs which is apparently quite good (software raid though) but I'm not sure how safe a £15 card would be with my data. I'm not overly bothered about how fast it is, mainly just that the controller isn't going to take out all my data. Being able to expand the array later on would be a very good thing to have too.

 

[JN]

I've used quite a few 3ware RAID controllers for RAID5 and they work very well. Only problem is they certainly aint £15 :/

 

[Doddsy]

Doesn't need to be quite that cheap, most decent ones seem to start at over £100 though. I could maybe stretch to one of those, definitely couldn't stretch to the £4-500 monsters.

Highpoint 1740LF, anybody have any idea about this card?

 

[JN]

Doesn't need to be quite that cheap, most decent ones seem to start at over £100 though. I could maybe stretch to one of those, definitely couldn't stretch to the £4-500 monsters.

Highpoint 1740LF, anybody have any idea about this card?

There's a few 3ware controllers that start ~£150, but afaik they are only RAID0/1. Might be worth checking out ebay for ones that have been pulled from servers - lots of people don't know the real value of them.

As for Highpoint, I've only really encountered them when Abit used to put their controllers on their old motherboards. They were pretty decent onboard, but I'm not sure what their add-in cards are like.

 

[nathan]

you if you have a raid 5 array with 3 disks, what happens if one of the disks go?

 

[JN]

you if you have a raid 5 array with 3 disks, what happens if one of the disks go?

AFAIK you just need to replace it and it'll rebuild from the other disks.

 

[Doddsy]

As you may have guessed I'm not too knowledgeble on RAID so this may be a really stupid question.

Would I be able to buy 2 drives and put them in raid1 for now and when I get more money get another drive and migrate the array across to raid5 without losing the data?

I'm looking at the highpoint rocketraid 2300, looks pretty good for what I want and it's cheap enough.

 

[JN]

Would I be able to buy 2 drives and put them in raid1 for now and when I get more money get another drive and migrate the array across to raid5 without losing the data?

No I don't think you would. Not only are RAID 1 & 5 very different technically, but also a RAID5 controller would most likely have a different controller so it might not even recognise your RAID1 array.

You'd need to back-up your raid1 array and then restore the data onto the raid5

 

[Doddsy]

Hmmm......

Cheers for the help, looks like I might need to just try and stretch the finances (ie Credit card!) to get 3 drives. Just thought it might be possible as the card supports 0,1, and 5.

This is getting bloody expensive!

 

[JN]

Cheers for the help, looks like I might need to just try and stretch the finances (ie Credit card!) to get 3 drives. Just thought it might be possible as the card supports 0,1, and 5.

Sorry I shudda checked the specs of the card you were pointing at. If it supports RAID0/1/5 then there is small chance you might be able to upgrade to RAID5 by installing another disk at a later date, but I couldn't say for certain. Sorry

 

[Doddsy]

Sorry I shudda checked the specs of the card you were pointing at. If it supports RAID0/1/5 then there is small chance you might be able to upgrade to RAID5 by installing another disk at a later date, but I couldn't say for certain. Sorry

Cool man, cheers for the help anyway:worship:

Might just go for the card just now (it's on sale) and get the drives when I can afford them.

Decisions, decisions..............

 

[NugentS]

No I don't think you would. Not only are RAID 1 & 5 very different technically, but also a RAID5 controller would most likely have a different controller so it might not even recognise your RAID1 array.

You'd need to back-up your raid1 array and then restore the data onto the raid5

No card I have ever seen (and I should qualify this with the fact that I haven't seen them all) will allow that sort of raid expansion...

Sean

 

[Doddsy]

Cool. As I said I'm not really what you'd call knowledgable when it comes to raid. I wasn't sure if you would be able to build an array around having a single drive with data on it. I'd guess not but it would have been handy if you could.

Now I just have to wait till I can afford a few drives.

 

[nunzio]

http://uk.insight.com/apps/productpresentation/index.php?product_id=ADGA04ZMZ&nbs_search=C%3D112%26S%3D101453%26M%3DAD%26lang%3Den-gb%26K%3D%26P%3D2

Cheap and pretty good. Only SATA 150, but should do a fileserver, unless you are on gigabit networking.

 

[Doddsy]

Cheers for the suggestion mate, I'd already bought a card though. Went for the highpoint 2300. It's PCI-E, which was perfect as I had a spare port, and it's sata300 (I do have gigabit networking).

I know it's not fully hardware raid but all this system will really be doing is being a fileserver and I think an a64 can handle that!

 

[blackoper]

ahh file servers. This is something I do well. I recommend you go linux and save on the hardware raid cards... If you are building a new pc for it, get an amd 3800x2 (35 watt one if possible) and a atx motherboard with as many sata 2 ports and pci-e slots as possible. If you need massive storage, I recommend getting silicon image 3124 or 3132 pci-e cards and port 1 to 5 sata portmultipliers based on the sil image chipset. Linux kernels 2.6.17 and 2.6.18 supported them with some light patching, and they will soon be built into the mailine kernel. Then get some Icy Dock 3 to 5 sata 2 enclosures and a cooler master stacker case and you have up to 20 hot swap hard drives available (plus the internal ones you can cram in there)

Check into the Openfiler distibution of rpath linux. I fiddled with it this week and was really impressed. It basically turns your pc into a low-end commercial nas (when I say low end, I mean one that retails for thousands). Setup was about 20 min for me and I had a raid 0 array and a raid 5 array built in another 15 min or so. WIth dual gigabit ethernet it was really serving out some data.