"Fake" RAID?

So from what I understand the technical meanings to be, there are three types of RAID:

1. Software RAID (entirely software)
2. "Fake" RAID (hardware assisted, but needs drivers)
3. Hardware RAID (entirely hardware, transparent)

However... I bought a 4-port Highpoint SATA RAID card (£100+) a couple of months back, and it needed drivers too. So where exactly can this true "Hardware" RAID be found as everything on the market seems to be fake RAID. I am particularly interested in this as transparent hardware RAID would solve many problems for me.


Thanks for any info you may have! :)

3ware, areca, lsi, higher-end adaptec

neither highpoint nor promise make hardware raid cards

and it's transparent as in "every OS will only see your arrays, not the individual disks" - you *will* still need drivers for everything bar the (very discontinued) xfx raid3 cards

Scan still sell the Revo 3 port hardware raid for £8.50

Description here,
but £10.50 on today only (has been for a week or two)

That uses standard drivers in windows, so windows sees 3 drives as one.

I'd go with 3ware, etc, as mentioned above for nice high end cards though.

Netcell went bust so no-one supports the Revo line any more. XFX might sell the cards, but the only support they will give is replacing a card if it breaks. And even then I wouldn't be too sure considering their history on RMAs.

you can'r buy the 5-port version because they ran out of the stockpile of chips, the obviously still have 3-port cards so are offloading them cheap.

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Originally Posted by directhex

3ware, areca, lsi, higher-end adaptec

neither highpoint nor promise make hardware raid cards

and it's transparent as in "every OS will only see your arrays, not the individual disks" - you *will* still need drivers for everything bar the (very discontinued) xfx raid3 cards

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HPT and Promise do make hardware raid cards with XScale processor on them, just not on the low-end models.

The XFX card is quite slow and seems to be quite incompatible with newer harddrives.
Some of the lower-end LSI card have really crap performance or only support RAID0+1 at most.

Just make sure you pick something that cost over 150 quids and you'll be pretty much fine.

Oh and the Revo isn't true hardware either. It is a bit of hardware and the rest in firmware, hence why it craps itself at the sight or new drives :)

No one is developing the firmware any more fr these problems will only increase in time.

The difference between "Fake" RAID & Hardware RAID mainly is that "Fake" RAID uses the CPU but they both still need drivers for the OS to see the card.

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Originally Posted by LegacyOne

The difference between "Fake" RAID & Hardware RAID mainly is that "Fake" RAID uses the CPU but they both still need drivers for the OS to see the card.

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more specifically, raid calculations are done by a cpu on the card (managed by a firmware on the card) with hardware cards. with fakeraid, it's done by the host cpu (by drivers for your os). it's important to point this out - with fakeraid, the drivers are what do the work. the card is essentially "dumb"

Stay away from REVO cards - ours died (like many others) for no apparent reason one day.

At a tenner each you just buy 2, and put the second card in if it dies....
RAID for PCI cards ;)

Thanks for all the replies. I found this while looking on SCAN: Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

Is this not a transparent hardware RAID unit?

Thanks

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Originally Posted by mikerr

At a tenner each you just buy 2, and put the second card in if it dies....
RAID for PCI cards ;)

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Which is exactly what I have done. :) Shame about netcell - the card seems to work pretty well (for me).

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Originally Posted by ta2

Thanks for all the replies. I found this while looking on SCAN: Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK

Is this not a transparent hardware RAID unit?

Thanks

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it is. and a high end one at that

neat!

Okay, I think I have managed to decide what I am going to do! :) I am gonna build a new PC, I just have a couple of things I need help with:

Intel E6750 @ 1333MHz FSB
[Insert Motherboard]
8400GS
4GB RAM @ 667MHz
Adaptec 5805 RAID card (PCIe x8)
1x160GB SATA on motherboard (OS - Windows XP x64)
4x750GB SATA on Adaptec 5805 (RAID 5 - storage)

Having a bit of difficulty finding a suitable motherboard. As you can see above, it needs:

1333MHz FSB
1x PCIe 16x @ 1x
1x PCIe 8x+ @ 8x+

I quite like ASUS for motherboards but am open to suggestions. Thanks for any help! :)

just out of curiosity what are you trying to build ?

A server or a general purpose desktop. if your going for a server it would be a better choice to drop windows and maybe try linux. if your off for a general purpose desktop vista would probably be a better choice in that regard

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Originally Posted by alsenior

just out of curiosity what are you trying to build ?

A server or a general purpose desktop. if your going for a server it would be a better choice to drop windows and maybe try linux. if your off for a general purpose desktop vista would probably be a better choice in that regard

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It's basically gonna be a file server (got another PC for gaming etc), but I will use it for Usenet as well, which I like to use NewsLeecher for as it does everything in one click. If anyone knows a way of getting from NZB to extracted file in one click in Linux then please let me know (could use WINE I suppose...). Vista is out of the question... I tried Vista x64 w/SP1 on my laptop last week and it is infact still IMPOSSIBLE to turn off blurtype a.k.a. "clear"type.

Vista -> :angst: <- XP

I have had bad experiences with Linux in the past. Mainly not Linux's fault per se (closed source drivers, badly ported DirectX applications) but that doesn't really make things any less annoying when they happen. Also I tried a £100 jobby Highpoint RocketRAID card a couple of months back and it was useless (not useless, but worse than ICH9R). Also I found out after I bought it that the nix drivers were not infact open source as advertised but closed source in an open source wrapper. Anyone know what Adaptec's are like?

I know all Windows drivers are closed source but the windows kernel changes once every 2 years... Linux gets an update every 2 weeks or so.

Planning to just have it running a VNC server so I wont be having a monitor for it, but I want it to have a (cheap) dedicated graphics card anyway.

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Originally Posted by ta2

It's basically gonna be a file server (got another PC for gaming etc), but I will use it for Usenet as well, which I like to use NewsLeecher for as it does everything in one click. If anyone knows a way of getting from NZB to extracted file in one click in Linux then please let me know

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Code:

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directhex@mortos:~$ apt-cache search nzb
hellanzb - Newzbin (nzb) & BinNews (bns) files downloader and post-processor
klibido - usenet binary grabber for KDE
libnzb-dev - An nzb based Usenet binary grabber (development files)
libnzb0c2a - An nzb based Usenet binary grabber (runtime library)
nzb - An nzb based Usenet binary grabber
python-yenc - yEnc encoding/decoding extension for Python

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of the above, "nzb" and "klibido" are GUI apps

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Anyone know what Adaptec's are like?

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supported by the in-kernel "aacraid" driver, as of several years

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I know all Windows drivers are closed source but the windows kernel changes once every 2 years... Linux gets an update every 2 weeks or so.

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don't update every fortnight then. run a distribution which has a lengthy support cycle

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Originally Posted by directhex

Code:

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directhex@mortos:~$ apt-cache search nzb
hellanzb - Newzbin (nzb) & BinNews (bns) files downloader and post-processor
klibido - usenet binary grabber for KDE
libnzb-dev - An nzb based Usenet binary grabber (development files)
libnzb0c2a - An nzb based Usenet binary grabber (runtime library)
nzb - An nzb based Usenet binary grabber
python-yenc - yEnc encoding/decoding extension for Python

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of the above, "nzb" and "klibido" are GUI apps

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By "NZB to extracted file" what I mean is:

NZB -> Broken RARs + PAR2 -> Fixed RARs -> tvepisode.mkv

If you went Linux, you could use the built in Linux Kernel RAID drivers. No need to worry about hardware card driver compatability, and with a machine of that spec, there will be negligible performance hit.

This is really meant to be a high performance file server, so software RAID is out of the question. I have narrowed it down to two possible cards I think:

Adaptec 5805
Areca ARC-1220

The Adaptec card seems to have much better specs, and is cheaper... but someone said that Areca's solution is "proper" hardware RAID (i.e. transparent)? I have seen this and this (see "1.02 drivers"), which make it seem otherwise though.

Would be nice if these websites explained what their products do better!

Thanks again :)

They are both hardware RAID cards.