RAID controller for home PC/Server

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1101

3121 posts

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#1988123 4-Apr-2018 11:14

Ive had a couple of issues with some of the cheap HP Raid cards (in cheap HP servers)..

to the extent I had to remove it & go with software raid .

Perhaps consider a NAS instead ?

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Dynamic

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#1988126 4-Apr-2018 11:24

1101:

Ive had a couple of issues with some of the cheap HP Raid cards (in cheap HP servers).

to the extent I had to remove it & go with software raid .

Perhaps consider a NAS instead ?

Wow that *really* surprises me, as someone who has been working with dozens of small and medium sized HP servers for 15+ years. I've found the SmartArray cards pretty jolly good and never had a failure. The only significant issue I had was when I did something dumb and turned on drive caching on a brand new Exchange 2007 server to make an installation go faster, and forgot to turn it off. A power failure (again a dumb human action) resulted in a corrupt Exchange database which took half a day to repair..... bit embarrassing at the time!

NAS are not without issues, in my experience, but if you stick with a reputable one like a QNAP or Synology you should be pretty much right.

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Paul1977

4983 posts

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#1988131 4-Apr-2018 11:40

1101:

Ive had a couple of issues with some of the cheap HP Raid cards (in cheap HP servers)..

to the extent I had to remove it & go with software raid .

Perhaps consider a NAS instead ?

NAS not ideal in my situation for various reasons.

I also haven't had a problem with HP Smart Arrays, however if I get this it will be my first attempt at using one in a non-HP server (and first time off Ebay, as opposed to brand new).

At the moment I'm leaning toward an HP P420 with 1GB FBWC, only like $140 on Ebay. If it works well then I'll probably by a second one to keep as a backup in case of card failure.

Lias

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#1988164 4-Apr-2018 12:57

@Paul1977 I have some old IBM/LSI raid cards without backing plates sitting around at home somewhere, pulled from old servers.. If you want you can have one to play with.

I'm a geek, a gamer, a dad, a Quic user, and an IT Professional. I have a full rack home lab, size 15 feet, an epic beard and Asperger's. I'm a bit of a Cypherpunk, who believes information wants to be free and the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. If you use my Quic signup you can also use the code R570394EKGIZ8 for free setup.

Paul1977

4983 posts

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#1988173 4-Apr-2018 13:07

@Dynamic and @sparkz25 It sounds like you guys have already gone through this exercise, so I was hoping maybe you could answer one last question.

I'm looking at the P420 as I believe that supports 6Gb/s on SATA drives (correct me if I'm wrong), unlike the P410 which drops back to 3Gb/s on SATA.

But for the 8087-SATA cables on Ebay, I'm having trouble figuring out if any of them are 6Gb/s per channel. Some say 6Gb/s and some 10Gb/s, but it's unclear if that is per channel or the max speed for all 4 channels. From what I can tell, the StarTech available locally is 6Gb/s per channel, but that is a lot more expensive than the ebay ones! Do you guys have any more knowledge about this?

Thanks

Paul1977

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#1988176 4-Apr-2018 13:10

Lias:

@Paul1977 I have some old IBM/LSI raid cards without backing plates sitting around at home somewhere, pulled from old servers.. If you want you can have one to play with.

Thanks for the offer @Lias, but I think I'm going to go for an HP off Ebay since I am already reasonably familiar with them from working with HP servers. Thanks again though.

Dynamic

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#1988181 4-Apr-2018 13:13

Paul1977:

But for the 8087-SATA cables on Ebay, I'm having trouble figuring out if any of them are 6Gb/s per channel. Some say 6Gb/s and some 10Gb/s, but it's unclear if that is per channel or the max speed for all 4 channels.

I'm highly confident that it will be 6Gb/s per SATA channel, which will outstrip the 100-150mbps hard drive performance by a loooooong way.

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Paul1977

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#1988211 4-Apr-2018 14:05

Dynamic:

Paul1977:

But for the 8087-SATA cables on Ebay, I'm having trouble figuring out if any of them are 6Gb/s per channel. Some say 6Gb/s and some 10Gb/s, but it's unclear if that is per channel or the max speed for all 4 channels.

I'm highly confident that it will be 6Gb/s per SATA channel, which will outstrip the 100-150mbps hard drive performance by a loooooong way.

Thanks, and I guess at $6 a cable I can't go too wrong any way!

1101

3121 posts

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#1988665 5-Apr-2018 10:49

Dynamic:

Wow that *really* surprises me, as someone who has been working with dozens of small and medium sized HP servers for 15+ years. I've found the SmartArray cards pretty jolly good and never had a failure.

On the descent machines : ML350's and above , not an issue

On the cheaper/budget HP servers & cheaper HP raid cards : (not a big sample size , but not a good track record for me)
had an issue where approx ever 5th restart Raid card wouldnt detect the drives properly : on a brand new server due for install the next day.
had an issue with a HP add on raid card with data corruption after install : I highly suspect it was caused by the RAID card
also had an when updating RAID card firmware made it incompatible with the (low spec) server :-0

shrub

768 posts

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#1988926 5-Apr-2018 17:31

I just went down this road last month and went for a cheap 4 port sata pci-e 1x card off ebay. I setup windows storage spaces in parity mode with 5 4tb drives 1 3tb and 2 2tb. Gave me 23.1tb available there is added overheads though. 5.2tb data consumes 7 of the 23 Tb. I set the initial size at 50tb so I can just upgrade the drives gradually over many years.

Write speeds are terrible 10-20mb/s after the first gb. Be prepared for long transfer times.

Read speeds are really good though 400+mb/s sustained.

Paul1977

4983 posts

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#1989367 6-Apr-2018 11:20

shrub:

I just went down this road last month and went for a cheap 4 port sata pci-e 1x card off ebay. I setup windows storage spaces in parity mode with 5 4tb drives 1 3tb and 2 2tb. Gave me 23.1tb available there is added overheads though. 5.2tb data consumes 7 of the 23 Tb. I set the initial size at 50tb so I can just upgrade the drives gradually over many years.

Write speeds are terrible 10-20mb/s after the first gb. Be prepared for long transfer times.

Read speeds are really good though 400+mb/s sustained.

Poor write speeds aren't that surprising using software RAID with parity generation. But are you getting 20Mb/s or 20MB/s (megabits or megabytes)?

I've ordered an HP P420 with 1GB FBWC off Ebay now for $140. Going to start with a RAID1 of 2x 12TB, then when I need more space add another 12TB and convert to RAID 5 (FBWC allows RAID level migrations). Then I can just add additional HDDs to the RAID 5 as my storage requirements increase. That's the theory anyway.

It'll be interesting to see the kind of write speeds I get after I migrate it to RAID 5 on this card, but that will likely be months away.

timbosan

2137 posts

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#1989402 6-Apr-2018 11:36

Paul1977:

shrub:

I just went down this road last month and went for a cheap 4 port sata pci-e 1x card off ebay. I setup windows storage spaces in parity mode with 5 4tb drives 1 3tb and 2 2tb. Gave me 23.1tb available there is added overheads though. 5.2tb data consumes 7 of the 23 Tb. I set the initial size at 50tb so I can just upgrade the drives gradually over many years.

Write speeds are terrible 10-20mb/s after the first gb. Be prepared for long transfer times.

Read speeds are really good though 400+mb/s sustained.

Poor write speeds aren't that surprising using software RAID with parity generation. But are you getting 20Mb/s or 20MB/s (megabits or megabytes)?

I've ordered an HP P420 with 1GB FBWC off Ebay now for $140. Going to start with a RAID1 of 2x 12TB, then when I need more space add another 12TB and convert to RAID 5 (FBWC allows RAID level migrations). Then I can just add additional HDDs to the RAID 5 as my storage requirements increase. That's the theory anyway.

It'll be interesting to see the kind of write speeds I get after I migrate it to RAID 5 on this card, but that will likely be months away.

Slightly OT - did you source the 12TB drives locally? If so, what kind if price did you paid? I am looking at upgrading from 8TB + 4TB + 4TB + 2TB + 3TB, to far fewer disks.

Benoire

2760 posts

Uber Geek

#1989406 6-Apr-2018 11:43

shrub:

I just went down this road last month and went for a cheap 4 port sata pci-e 1x card off ebay. I setup windows storage spaces in parity mode with 5 4tb drives 1 3tb and 2 2tb. Gave me 23.1tb available there is added overheads though. 5.2tb data consumes 7 of the 23 Tb. I set the initial size at 50tb so I can just upgrade the drives gradually over many years.

Write speeds are terrible 10-20mb/s after the first gb. Be prepared for long transfer times.

Read speeds are really good though 400+mb/s sustained.

Windows Storage Spaces in parity mode is just shocking in general, they haven't got it sorted yet and its not worth using. Linux software raid is much better, and I max out my Ethernet speeds when moving files around.

Paul1977

4983 posts

Uber Geek

#1989574 6-Apr-2018 15:43

timbosan:

Slightly OT - did you source the 12TB drives locally? If so, what kind if price did you paid? I am looking at upgrading from 8TB + 4TB + 4TB + 2TB + 3TB, to far fewer disks.

Locally, just jumped on pricespy to find the best price currently in stock. WD Gold Edition @ $856 per drive. The 10TB is actually slightly better value for money, but I was happy to pay slightly more per GB to get the largest capacity.

Just got the one at the moment (and that hasn't actually arrived yet), and will order a second one closer to when my RAID card arrives to create a mirror (I'm hoping the price drops between now and then, or there is a special).

shrub

768 posts

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#1993041 10-Apr-2018 23:02

Benoire:

shrub:

I just went down this road last month and went for a cheap 4 port sata pci-e 1x card off ebay. I setup windows storage spaces in parity mode with 5 4tb drives 1 3tb and 2 2tb. Gave me 23.1tb available there is added overheads though. 5.2tb data consumes 7 of the 23 Tb. I set the initial size at 50tb so I can just upgrade the drives gradually over many years.

Write speeds are terrible 10-20mb/s after the first gb. Be prepared for long transfer times.

Read speeds are really good though 400+mb/s sustained.

Windows Storage Spaces in parity mode is just shocking in general, they haven't got it sorted yet and its not worth using. Linux software raid is much better, and I max out my Ethernet speeds when moving files around.

So yea i got burnt. My storage space had a write error. All disks checked out ok. The problem was not a drive and I still have no idea what caused it. I had to google s.. out of it and found loads of forums with people complaining of the same issue. 1 Post suggested using diskpart to enable the drive which put it in read only. All the data was still there so I had to move it all off and close the storage space.

4 days later cheers Microsoft.

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