Looking for a Raid Controller

ProNewb4Life · October 23, 2017

I'm looking for a raid controller for 5 2TB WD blacks. I would like the option to add larger drives but the main concern is price. I would like to stay around $100 but I also don't want a crap card. Anyone have any suggestions?

System build here: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/yYHbd6

leadeater · October 23, 2017

What OS will you be using and what is the main purpose of the system? If it's going to be running Windows just use Storage Spaces and the SATA ports on the motherboard until you run out of them, then buy a LSI 9211 flashed to IT mode or a variant of it from IBM or Dell use ebay.

You shouldn't need an actual RAID card but that does depend on your requirements.

ProNewb4Life · October 24, 2017

I'm using windows 10 and the pc is used for gaming and encoding video. I was using the on board raid controller but today it kicked a drive out of the raid for no apparent reason. I was hopping a raid card would be less prone to system changes affecting it. This is the first time I ventured into raid and 4TB of data went poof because the Intel raid controller decided to be dumb as far as I know. Here is what I know for sure I want to use the 5 2TB drives in raid 0 or 5 and I want as much reliability (besides drive failure) as I can get.

BTW Know of any good raid partition recovery tools?

leadeater · October 24, 2017

40 minutes ago, ProNewb4Life said:

I'm using windows 10 and the pc is used for gaming and encoding video. I was using the on board raid controller but today it kicked a drive out of the raid for no apparent reason. I was hopping a raid card would be less prone to system changes affecting it. This is the first time I ventured into raid and 4TB of data went poof because the Intel raid controller decided to be dumb as far as I know. Here is what I know for sure I want to use the 5 2TB drives in raid 0 or 5 and I want as much reliability (besides drive failure) as I can get.

BTW Know of any good raid partition recovery tools?

RAID card will be just as prone to kicking the disks out of the array, WD Blacks are not designed for use in RAID so don't feature TLER which is important for stable operation in a RAID array. Also yea Intel onbaord RAID is pretty terrible.

Recover My Files is excellent and is able to handle recovery of files/partitions from disks that were in a RAID array.

Because you have (unless you haven't purchased yet otherwise buy WD Reds) software RAID will be safer so I'd recommend Windows Storage Spaces, it's inbuilt and free to use. I would advise using two-way mirror (sort of like RAID 10) for performance reasons since it parity write performance is rather slow. You can speed that up a lot by using an SSD in journal mode to cache writes.