Recommended Posts

Hi All!

I'm on the lookout for a RAID card for my server. I'm a Mac guy usually, so I'm kind of out of the loop when it comes to this sort of stuff :p. I basically need:

- PCI-e

- Raid 5

- 4 Drives (I'll be using 4 x 4TB drives)

- Mini-SAS

Budget wise - it's not really a performance server, so ideally as low as possible :p. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1139824-raid-card-suggestions/
Share on other sites

It's running ESXi.

You're gonna have to get a very expensive one if you want some performance. I am running ESXi on http://www.newegg.co...N82E16816118130 and it's performance is pretty bad because ESXi does not support write-cache and it will not allow you to enable write-back on that controller since it doesn't have a battery. http://communities.v...message/2012333

You're gonna have to get a very expensive one if you want some performance. I am running ESXi on http://www.newegg.co...N82E16816118130 and it's performance is pretty bad because ESXi does not support write-cache and it will not allow you to enable write-back on that controller since it doesn't have a battery. http://communities.v...message/2012333

Ah awesome - didn't know that! Well that's going to bump the price up a bit then! I've been recommended the HP P410 - which you can get (occasionally) with 256MB cache for just under ?100, and the battery is around ?60.

Yes I'd recommend the HP smart cache P410 which is what I'm using.

The 256MB cache will be utter crap, I'd recommend the 512MB or the 1GB if you can find/afford it, I've got the 1GB and it runs smooth as hell, when extracting packages on a linux VM it's just like extracting them into RAM (which I guess is actually what is happening, extract to the RAID RAM and it slowly moves it to the hard drives).

Anyway, it is very good but ESXi still lists it as not hardware accellerated or something, I've given up with ESXi's rubbish meaningless error messages.

Yeah, I gave up on ESXi's error reporting long ago. For a home server, I'll use common sense with it - if it's working, I'll ignore it :p. I may take more notice in a production environment though.

In theory, I could get away with a P400 as opposed to the P410 (which would be considerably cheaper), but I would have to pull off a cabling miracle to get it all connected, whereas the 410 will connect straight to the mini-sas backplane that's already wired up (and there's not really room to be running additional cables around in there).

To be able to use the P400 without having to rewire the entire innards I would need a female mini-SAS (SFF-8087) to 2 x SFF-8484, which I've not been able to find.

The alternate is to just run an individual cable to each drive, bypassing the backplane, but it's going to be fiddly and I think I'd rather just spend a little bit more for some convenience :p.

You mean like these 2 cables I've got lying on my desk? ;)

VsNukj7.jpg

Wrong gender I think.

if you run a cable to each drive (SATA cable) then the drives won't run as they'll be missing the SAS connectors on the back, you'd need to get the proper SAS drive cables.

I'd get an LSI 9260-8i. I bought mine on ebay for ~260$ (NEW) and then went with an Intel RES2SV240 24 port SAS expander. One port on the LSI card goes to the sas expander, the other 5 ports on the SAS expander go to 4x 5-in-3 supermicro hotswap backplanes in my case, so I can run 20 drives, and I still have one channel left on the RAID controller to run to an external storage box if I want, so that I can cascade even more drives.

The Intel card was around 170$, so ~400 Total, and I can push 500MB/sec+ to consumer drives in RAID 5

"RAID5 is available on the SA P420/P420i with a minimum of 512MB cache"

"RAID5 is available on the SA P410/P410i with a minimum of 256MB cache and battery"

oh, didn't know that, thanks.

on a side note: yeah 256MB for cache is insufficient.

  • 3 weeks later...

Just thought I'd update this thread in case it helps out anyone else on a budget (couldn't justify like ?2-300 on a raid card when the box itself only cost ?100 (HP Microserver)).

I picked up a HP P400 (not the 410) with the 512MB cache unit, and BBU on eBay for ?42. Had to be quite careful as I needed one with the ports on the back, which was seemed to be rarer. This, combined with an ?8 (again, eBay) SFF-8484 to 4 x SATA cable and some ridiculously hard cable routing works perfectly.

ESXi performance is about right - re-used some of the existing cabling to move the ESXi boot + VMs to an SSD while I was in there too.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • 1. Define "better". 2. It's still more expensive than equivalent PCs so...
    • Major Xbox layoffs may claim South of Midnight developer Compulsion entirely by Pulasthi Ariyasinghe Microsoft has been making major changes in its gaming wing Xbox for a few months now, including the appointment of a new CEO, a large number of leadership changes, and strategy shifts. However, the company is seemingly also looking at initiating a major layoffs wave at Xbox and perhaps even a studio closure. The new report lands from Kotaku, Xbox first-party developer Compulsion Games is being shuttered soon by Microsoft. For those unfamiliar with the studio, it's the team behind Contrast (2013), We Happy Few (2018), and South of Midnight (2025). Its latest game was quite well received, even winning a Peabody Award for its writing. It even received a 9/10 in Neowin's own review, highlighting its engaging storyline, gorgeous world, and curious characters. The studio joined Xbox Game Studios in 2018, just as Microsoft announced it is acquiring Playground Games, Undead Labs, and Ninja Theory. Despite recent listings for new staff roles, according to the new report, Compulsion Games is being closed entirely, with over 90 staff being let go. Kotaku also added that the studio's leadership is in negotiations with Microsoft about this decision, but no official details have been revealed yet. The report lands just as two senior managers of Xbox leave their posts at Microsoft Gaming. Head of Xbox Game Studios Craig Duncan and chief of staff Louise O'Connor originally began their journey in Rare and have been a part of Xbox for over two decades. Dunkan has been responsible for games like Kinect Sports and Sea of Thieves, while O'Connor was primarily working on Rare's Everwild project before its cancelation. If this report about the studio shutdown is accurate, this may just be the start of a major new layoffs wave at Xbox Game Studios. There are also rumors of Arkane Studios being heavily affected. As always, take all these reports with a grain of salt until something official materializes from Microsoft or the studios.
    • The flaw with this analysis is that this laptop has a cellphone CPU in it. In the Intel world, that would be an N150 and those are everywhere, even in low end laptops. You can get an N150 based NUC with 16GB RAM and 256GB-512GB SSD... NOT soldered in... for < $500 Canadian (around US$360). The problem is two fold: tech bloggers/writers on most tech site (like this one, ironically) overvalue Apple and apparently aren't in the same earnings class as most regular people. As a result, we get breathless articles about how everyone needs a folding phone when most people just cannot afford one... or really need one. And we get Apple used as the baseline metric regardless of whether that comparison makes any sense. If Dell or HP released a retail laptop with a cellphone motherboard, you'd be all over them for doing that - but Apple does it and it's genius. I see articles suggesting what Samsung - a company that basically started the foldable phone market and has built them for eight years - needs to do to compete with Apple's unreleased, unspecced and unseen folding phone. Sorry, no - if the Neo (really creative name there BTW - still, better than the Go, the other "creative" product name everyone's using) encourages PC makers to make cellphone laptops using lower end ARM processors, we all lose. It's a step backwards and a capitulation to the fact that semiconductor makers and computer OEMs (and tech bloggers) have totally lost the plot.
    • Everyone should install this extension and ignore games that use AI. https://chromewebstore.google....nnigaaeelfkeomjcngmnh?pli=1 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ai-warning-for-steam/
  • Recent Achievements

    • One Year In
      ThatGuyOnline earned a badge
      One Year In
    • Week One Done
      Jeroen Wilms earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Week One Done
      rolfus earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • One Month Later
      Leroy Jethro Gibbs earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Conversation Starter
      flexorcist earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      506
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      199
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      127
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      82
    5. 5
      ATLien_0
      75
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!