I Need A Raidcard That Supports 3tb Drives With Onboard Cache

[Nattan]

I am looking to buy one, but I would like some suggestions I would like to keep it under $400 and I dont mind if it is a used card.

 

any suggestions?

 

Edit:

 

Specs:

ASUS P9X79 WS LGA 2011 I

3   3TB drives raid 5

2  ssds raid 0

[Nattan]

ops i guess i could have mentioned that, its going to be in a workstation.

 

 

ASUS P9X79 WS LGA 2011 I

[nishank93]

Look at Adaptec's RAID cards. They're pretty fantastic.

[Eric1024]

Honestly, you would have no problem running all of that off the the onboard controller. The x79 chipset has 2x sata 6gb/s ports (for the ssd's) and 4 sata 3gb/s (for the HDD's). 3gb/s will be more than enough for mechanical drives.

 

Now, that being said, if you're still dead set on getting a raid controller and you want to run all 5 of those devices off of it, you're going to need a controller with 8 ports (they only come in multiples of 4) which is going to run you considerably more than 400$ if you want a good one (and raid controllers are like PSU's, never ever go cheep).

 

If you can't tell yet I really suggest that you use onboard (coming from someone who uses a 3rd party controller for raid 6). BUT if you're still dead set on getting one, go for an lsi 9260 -8i or an adaptec 7805. You can pick up the lsi card for 400$ or so on ebay.

 

I have the 4i (4 port) version of the lsi card and I've had no major issues with it. I'm running 4x3TB wd reds off of it in raid 6 and I get 185MB/s reads or so and up to 240MB/s writes. As a warning though, raid cards get HOT. As in, if you shut down the machine, you better give it a few minutes before you even think about touching the card because it will burn your fingers (learned that the hard way :/) so unless you're running it in a rackmount box with some crazy high cfm fans, then you might want to prepare to replace the heat sink.

[Eric1024]

Oh and in response to your title, basically all modern raid cards support 3tb drives and have onboard cache, so if you're searching under those criteria then you don't really need to worry about anything :P