Raid 5 card?

[Thaurane]

I have the x470 gaming plus motherboard. Unfortunately it doesn't support raid5. Does anyone know of a good raid5 controller card? The primary use will be personal use storage with some amounts of file retrieval. There are plenty on amazon but I'm unsure of which to go with. Any help would be appreciated!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Is this for boot or for a non boot drive?

If its for a non boot drive id just use software raid, it works better and is built into windows. Look at storage spaces.

[Thaurane]

Thanks for the reply! Its just for non boot drive. I've looked into online tutorials but it isn't clear as to use a stripped or spanned drive. What I'm mainly looking for from it is redundancy and because of that I wasn't sure which one to choose and why raid 5 interested me.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, Thaurane said:

Thanks for the reply! Its just for non boot drive. I've looked into online tutorials but it isn't clear as to use a stripped or spanned drive. What I'm mainly looking for from it is redundancy and because of that I wasn't sure which one to choose and why raid 5 interested me.

Id just use storage spaces, don't use the raid in disk management.

 

Id follow this. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/12438/windows-10-storage-spaces

 

Basically search for storage spaces in start, and make a new storage space.

[kirashi]

56 minutes ago, Thaurane said:

I have the x470 gaming plus motherboard. Unfortunately it doesn't support raid5. Does anyone know of a good raid5 controller card? The primary use will be personal use storage with some amounts of file retrieval. There are plenty on amazon but I'm unsure of which to go with. Any help would be appreciated!

Just remember that RAID IS NOT A BACKUP. Say it with me: "RAID. IS NOT. A BACKUP."

 

Now that we've got that out of the way, I'd personally also go with @Electronics Wizardy's suggestion of using software "RAID" aka Disk Pooling because it eliminates the potential inability to recover a failed RAID array that you have with hardware RAID cards. Windows Storage Spaces works well enough I'd imagine, but there are alternatives out there such as StableBit Drive Pool, UnRAID, and Drive Bender, all of which don't care about the hardware you have your drives connected to so long as they show up as "Just a Bunch of Disks" aka JBOD.

 

This way if you ever have to reinstall Windows, change motherboards, or replace your HBA/SAS to SATA card, you can near instantly restore your Disk Pool without having to go through a lengthy rebuild that would come with a failed RAID card, or worse yet, having to restore from backup because your hardware RAID card failed, and you can't find another one running a compatible firmware version so you're unable to rebuild the array.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

7 minutes ago, kirashi said:

Just remember that RAID IS NOT A BACKUP. Say it with me: "RAID. IS NOT. A BACKUP."

Just in case anyone missed it the first two times, RAID IS NOT A BACKUP!

 

RAID is redundancy. All it can do is protect you from data loss due to one or more drive failures, depending on the array's failure tolerance (RAID 5's is one drive). It will not protect you if the number of failed drives exceeds the failure tolerance nor will it protect you from data loss due to viruses and other malware, user error, disasters like fire or flood, teft, etc. Even RAIDs need to be backed up.

[Thaurane]

Ok I've been looking for an answer for my original question for a few hours now (various websites). Software raids do not interest me for a variety of reasons. What I need is a recommended controller card.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Thaurane said:

Ok I've been looking for an answer for my original question for a few hours now (various websites). Software raids do not interest me for a variety of reasons. What I need is a recommended controller card.

Why do you want software raid here? Its normally the better solution?

 

Whats your budget for hardware raid card?

[Razor Blade]

31 minutes ago, Thaurane said:

Ok I've been looking for an answer for my original question for a few hours now (various websites). Software raids do not interest me for a variety of reasons. What I need is a recommended controller card.

How come? Are you planning on putting a large number of drives in your array? Or were you planning on using SAS drives or something? Hardware RAID controllers are just software on chip devices that hard drives interface with. Software RAID like ZFS or Microsoft storage pools cost literally nothing if you have the cables to hook the drives up to your motherboard. Personally I use software RAID. It is more flexible, cheaper, and way more features/options (for example some of those flexible arrays like Unraid, Synology, or Microsoft storage spaces has).

 

If you're insistent on a controller, you will need to figure out how many drives you need it to support. If it is 8 or less, you could go with something like an LSI 9260-8i and SFF-8087 to SATA breakout cables. If you're going to be using the RAID function with write-back cache enabled I highly suggest a battery for that controller as well. All said and done for controller, battery, and 2 cables should be around USD $300 from Amazon.