Reliable Raid Controller?

[A Friendly N00b]

I'm planning on building a new PC soon and since I recently suffered a hard drive failure, I want to ensure redundancy as much as I can going forward. Can anyone recommend a reliable raid controller  card that supports Raid 5, preferably in the $50-$100 range?

[Windows7ge]

Is this for storage disks? Why not just use Windows Storage Spaces?

[Kilrah]

As a start, understand that all a RAID is good for is preventing downtime in case of a physical drive failure. You still want a separate backup on offline media.

[A Friendly N00b]

6 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

Is this for storage disks? Why not just use Windows Storage Spaces?

I was hoping to use a raid controller card since it has better performance than software raid like windows storage spaces.

 

6 hours ago, Kilrah said:

As a start, understand that all a RAID is good for is preventing downtime in case of a physical drive failure. You still want a separate backup on offline media.

Definitely! Any recommendations for services to keep data backups online?

[scottyseng]

Why not just use a software to sync the folders you want to back up?

 

A proper RAID controller costs a fair lot of money (Usually $250+). I would really recommend a NAS running a software RAID OS like Unraid, FreeNAS, etc.

[Kilrah]

If you've got an intel build then the chipset already has built in RST can do RAID5 without any additional hardware.

 

3 hours ago, A Friendly N00b said:

Any recommendations for services to keep data backups online?

Nope, I only back up on my own drives. 2 sets, one at home and one off site that I rotate.

[Windows7ge]

8 hours ago, A Friendly N00b said:

I was hoping to use a raid controller card since it has better performance than software raid like windows storage spaces.

Depends on what RAID level you're using. Today for your average home user Software RAID can perform just as well as Hardware RAID depending on how you set it up.

 

If you insist on hardware maybe look into the Dell PERC H710. It can be had cheap.

[Electronics Wizardy]

12 hours ago, A Friendly N00b said:

I was hoping to use a raid controller card since it has better performance than software raid like windows storage spaces.

Not really the case anymore, you can get very good performance with software raid, try that first, should easily get the full speed from the disks.

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 hours ago, Kilrah said:

If you've got an intel build then the chipset already has built in RST can do RAID5 without any additional hardware.

thats not really hardware raid, that still uses the cpu for doing the raid calculations, and has many downfalls of any other motherboard build in raid.

[Jarsky]

 

22 hours ago, Kilrah said:

As a start, understand that all a RAID is good for is preventing downtime in case of a physical drive failure. You still want a separate backup on offline media.

It depends on his usage. At home I don't backup my media shares because theyre in the 10's of TB's and is data that can be reobtained.

Instead I use RAID6 which has saved my data  twice from disk failures in the last 10 years. So a RAID can be useful in the case of physical drive failure. 

 

What RAID doesnt protect you against is infected files, cryptolocker, accidental deletion, corruption, fire/flood/theft, and to some extent bitrot. 

[Kilrah]

Yep, the point is that drive failure is the only thing it protects you against, and it's just one of many possible causes of data loss, and arguably not the most common one... so if you care about your data you need another solution.