Raid 5 Controller

Mads-Ejnar · April 4, 2013

Hallo :)

I Want to buy 3 or 4 WD RED drives for a Raid 5.

I have a Asus rog formular IV x79 Motherbord and yes i can make a raid 5 on that. But when the day come i whant a new MB, i cannot take the raid setup over to the new MB whitout lossing my data. Is that right?

Thats way i whant a raid controller. That i can take over in the new pc and the raid will still work and not lose my data :)

Is all this right or am i wrong?

And do one of you know a good raid controller for pci-e? and for 100-200$ ?

Hope you can read my english. Its bad i know :/ but have a nice day :)

From Mads-Ejnar

azeotrope · April 5, 2013

What if you're raid controller fails? you'll still have to find one which supports the same standard, so that's not a good reason to go for a card instead of mobo raid. Intel raid standards will very likely not change or if they do they will most likely have some backwards compatibility. The only raid5 capable SATA cards in that price range that I'm aware of are highpoint and 3ware, which are OK for average use, but not at the LSI or adaptec level of quality. Something like the rocketraid 2310 may suit your needs.

wpirobotbuilder · April 5, 2013

There are advantages and disadvantages to adding a RAID card to your setup:

The most prominent advantages are fast transfer speeds due to the controller on the card, which runs much faster than motherboard RAID chipsets, as well as being able to configure advanced RAID like RAID 6, 50 and 60, plus JBOD and allowing for hot spare drives. Another one, depending on your needs, is the ability to hook up dozens of drives to the card through SATA connectors or 100+ drives through SAS extenders.

The disadvantages: RAID cards, for good quality, are very expensive. They also introduce a second point of failure to your system. If your motherboard dies then yes, you can port your array over to a new system. If your RAID card dies, you have to get a new one, which takes time and (depending on your warranty length) might be very expensive. Driver support can also be an issue. Your RAID array which can be ported from one PC to another may not work on hardware that comes out a few years down the road. In which case, you have to buy another RAID setup and move the whole thing over. Motherboard RAID has the same issues, however I would like to quote:

What if you're raid controller fails? you'll still have to find one which supports the same standard' date=' so that's not a good reason to go for a card instead of mobo raid. Intel raid standards will very likely not change or if they do they will most likely have some backwards compatibility.[/quote']
^ This guy. Intel RAID-capable chipsets are unlikely to change, which means you might actually be able to port it over directly. If not, you'll have to buy a new motherboard and move the data over manually. Which you would have to do anyways with a RAID controller. The difference is, you're buying a board which costs maybe $300 depending, not a several hundred dollar RAID card.

That being said, RAID cards do have their place in high-performance storage systems. It just comes at a higher cost. Motherboard RAID is perfectly suitable for building a RAID array depending on your needs, and how much you're willing to pay for your storage system.

Another option is to use something like FlexRAID, which offers software-based filesystem-aware snapshot RAID and real-time RAID. Because it's filesystem-aware, if you lose more drives than your tolerance is, you can still recover data from the other drives.

Mads-Ejnar · April 8, 2013

Hey thanks for your reply :D the reason is i want some sort of Raid is redundant. And Raid 5 i only lose 1 drive. And i have 4 small old drives now. So you think if i am lucky i can take the drives over to the new MB i will buy in some years and maybe it will just work? But is locking like the best thing will be to make a raid5 on my MB. then the day i want to change, move all the date to some other drives. make new raid setup and them move the date back?