Perc 5i Worth it?

ThatGuy · July 9, 2015

I recently got an old vista machine from my parents who upgraded. I thought about turning it into a cheap NAS box. I started looking around and I found that you can get Dell Perc 5is on Ebay for like $10 - $15. is there some kind of reason I shouldn't get this card and use it for raid 5? there has to be some kind of catch with this card for it to be so cheap. There are several listed on eBay for around $10 - $15, so it doesn't seem to be just one guy offloading dead cards.

Cheddle · July 9, 2015

I recently got an old vista machine from my parents who upgraded. I thought about turning it into a cheap NAS box. I started looking around and I found that you can get Dell Perc 5is on Ebay for like $10 - $15. is there some kind of reason I shouldn't get this card and use it for raid 5? there has to be some kind of catch with this card for it to be so cheap. There are several listed on eBay for around $10 - $15, so it doesn't seem to be just one guy offloading dead cards.

Assume its a Dell PERC5/i

They are $10 because they are OEM in Dell servers that use the 771 socket (anyone running a 771 in production should be fired) so there are literally thousands of them that have been thrown in the bin (along with the servers they lived inside) they are useless in a corporate environment and have been superseded.

I use one for my 4x500gb raid. from memory it uses sff-8484 cables (SAS-host side and SATA-target side) my calbes are "backplane" cables and they work fine going straight from card - > drives (no backplane)

a few catches.

1. It adds significant time to the boot cycle (its a server card)

2. the card can only achieve 1,000mb/s as the backbone of the card is PCI-X

3. pretty sure its SATA2

4. unsure on compatibility with drives over 2tb

5. you will need to cool it somehow. I mounted an old northbridge cooler on mine

6. you need to scrape off/damage/block two of the PCI-E pins to allow it to boot on Intel motherboards (guides online, very easy to do, I use a PCIE extender so I just pulled the pins)

7. you will need to somehow mount it as the server cards have no "slot" brackety thing for a normal PC case.

I use mine for RAID-0 however I am sure its RAID-5 performance is quite good, it will be more than enough for media streaming.