ANY RAID CARD Recommendations ?

[robbiesoto]

Hey guys what's up?

So anyways I just finished up my computer build for video editing!!! I have decided to fill up my hard drive cage with three WD Black 4tb drives. I want to put them in raid 5. Does anyone have any recommendations for a RAID card?

Thanks

[kevink817]

Not really an answer to your question, but if you haven't purchased the drives yet, I'd recommend the WD Red or WD Red Pro drives over the WD Blacks for anything other than Raid 0 or Raid 1 on a hardware RAID controller (or even software RAID for that matter.)

[Gofspar]

All of LSI's raid solutions are absolutely amazing.

[kevink817]

Heres an PCIe 2.0 x8 LSI card that is not too terribly expensive (relative to how much hardware raid cards usually cost) that looks like it supports Raid 5: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118129&cm_re=raid_lsi-_-16-118-129-_-Product

 

You would also need a separate cable to connect your drives up to it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=SFF-8087+to+sata&N=-1&isNodeId=1

[robbiesoto]

Not really an answer to your question, but if you haven't purchased the drives yet, I'd recommend the WD Red or WD Red Pro drives over the WD Blacks for anything other than Raid 0 or Raid 1 on a hardware RAID controller (or even software RAID for that matter.)

I thought about that but when I do purchase the drives I'll look at the price deference and if they aren't to much more expensive I will get them, and I think the blacks would do just fine in an 3 HHD RAID 5 array

[robbiesoto]

Heres an PCIe 2.0 x8 LSI card that is not too terribly expensive (relative to how much hardware raid cards usually cost) that looks like it supports Raid 5: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118129&cm_re=raid_lsi-_-16-118-129-_-Product

You would also need a separate cable to connect your drives up to it: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=SFF-8087+to+sata&N=-1&isNodeId=1

Thanks man!!! Exactly what I needed!!!

[kevink817]

Here why i recommend Reds over the Blacks for RAID:

 

http://www.wdc.com/en/library/other/2579-001098.pdf

 

TLER can help stop the RAID controller from marking the whole disk as bad when bad sectors are encountered, and instead only mark the sector as bad and rebuild only that data from parity in a different location.

[alpenwasser]

I thought about that but when I do purchase the drives I'll look at the price deference and if they aren't to much more expensive I will get them, and I think the blacks would do just fine in an 3 HHD RAID 5 array

There's an issue with using desktop drives in RAID configs, even high-end ones. When

a desktop drive encounters a problem reading a sector, it will keep trying to read that

data for a very long time, because it assumes that it has the only copy of that data

and if it fails to read it you have lost that data.

If you run such a drive in a RAID setup and this happens, the RAID controller, not getting

a response within a, from its POV, reasonable timeframe, will think the drive has been

damaged and will drop it from the array. This isn't such a big deal if it only happens

for a single drive, however it could happen with several drives at once, in which case

you're in some deep shit.

A RAID-optimised drive does not keep trying to read data for as long as a regular drive.

It will assume that there are other copies of that piece of data in the array and the

data can be read from there or reconstruced from parity (such as in RAID5).

That's why you really want a NAS/RAID-optimised drive when doing RAID5.

You can read more about the subject here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control

EDIT: Ninja'd