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I'm quite interested in getting a hardware RAID card for my file server, as mdadm dropped one of my hard drives last night for seemingly no reason, and now I have to wait 4 days for my raid to rebuild. The budget is around £250, looking for an 8-port card, with a PCI-E interface.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Cheers,
Steve
Your server doesn't have PCI-X in it does it?
No, but if a PCI-X card was going to be cheap enough, I would be willing to upgrade the board to one which does have PCI-X. That is, if I could get a PCI-X enabled socket 939 board!Quote:
Originally Posted by directhex
Areca all the way......it's going to be over-budget though, at around £450
The only thing in that budget range are the Highpoint controllers, I personally wouldn't use them but I've seen others who says they are fine.
There is absolutely no way my budget can stretch to £450.
What about picking one up second hand?
I've never seen a PCI-E SATA RAID controller for sale second-hand, other then the Highpoints.....
You may get lucky digging around though but I doubt it.
Out of interest shaithis, what Areca card do you have?
Do you think I could get a 4 port Areca for around about £250?
I've got the 1210 (4 port). I did pay around 250ukp for it but that was some time ago (over 2 years) from www.hamiltone.co.uk - they haven't got a price listed currently though.
Scan are charging ~300ukp for the 4 port.
3Ware are a well supported manufacturer, not as fast as the Areca cards but still good.
I would rather have an Areca too.... but know there was no way I would've gotten one on the cheap!
you come across them on eBay from time to time... I was looking for one (min 8 ports, pci-e & RAID5) around the 250 quid mark just before xmas and the more popular ones available back then within the budget seemed to be:Quote:
Originally Posted by shaithis
3ware 9650se/9690sa (new)
LSI MegaRAID 8208ELP (new and second hand)
Adaptec ICP 5000 series (second hand)
Adaptec 5805 (new for around 300)
In the end I picked up a 2nd hand pci-e 16 port Adaptec ICP5165BR card for 215 quid... this model is the former revision of Adaptec's current "series 5 Unified Serial Controllers" that seems to be quite popular.