What RAID card

[silent ben]

Bout to spend £300 on hard disc space, the problem is that i have no spaces left on my IDE cables. What i need is a raid card.

So what do you smart, talented people suggest as i know ur soo gd at this stuff

</end asskiss>

Ben

[Jiff Lemon]

I used a Highpoint Rocketraid 100 - Think it's now discontinued (been replaced with rocketraid 133).

Was faultless all the time I used it, and fairly cheap too.

However, why not buy B I G drives, and sell off your smaller ones?

[silent ben]

Cause i want 3 x 120GB drives, so i'm going to need RAID anyway.

Ben

[Moby-Dick]

the rocketraid 404 will support RAID 5 IDE if you update the bios

[Shorty]

Originally posted by Moby-Dick
the rocketraid 404 will support RAID 5 IDE if you update the bios

Il concur with that the 4 channel highpoint cards are really good value. They work really well. My EpoX 8K5A3+ had one onboard. I really miss it

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by Moby-Dick
the rocketraid 404 will support RAID 5 IDE if you update the bios

Yes, you can make the RocketRAID 404 to operate in RAID5, but it's only software RAID5 because that function (X-OR) is not built into the chip. In the end, it'll eat into your CPU cycles.

[Moby-Dick]

Originally posted by spikegifted
Yes, you can make the RocketRAID 404 to operate in RAID5, but it's only software RAID5 because that function (X-OR) is not built into the chip. In the end, it'll eat into your CPU cycles.

BS - I run a file server at work on one - it dont eat into any CPU at all.

If you can prove it, I'll happily take it back btw

[spikegifted]

Originally posted by Moby-Dick
BS - I run a file server at work on one - it dont eat into any CPU at all.

Ok... It was rather generalized sweeping statement to make... CPU utilization will not play a significant part if the CPU runs fast enough, e.g. another faster than say a P4 2GHz or XP2000+.

[Moby-Dick]

fair enough..... but have you got any links that mention it? I've not seen it mentioned before.

[spikegifted]

Here're some...

Adaptec

Dell

PCStats (also check out all the different levels)

ExtremeTech (again, check out the rest of the article)

IT Storage

[Moby-Dick]

I'm well aware of how RAID works , but none of those mention the Highpoint card ?

[Stoo]

afaik it's not true hardware raid until you get memory slots on the raid card

[Shorty]

Originally posted by Stoo
afaik it's not true hardware raid until you get memory slots on the raid card

Almost. Hardware RAID is defined by the processor embedded into the PCB and supported by cache memory (normally ECC SDRAM at the moment).

The use of controller card CPU (RISC chips are very common on controllers by LSI for example) is what determines whether it is hardware or software.