Decent Raid card for a reasonable price

[thedangerine]

I have been using my X99 board and Intel's rapid storage technology to run my seagate ironwolfs in a raid 1 for a while now but would like to get a decent raid card so that if the cmos gets cleared my raid array isn't forgotten. I will likely not be using anything more than 6 drives for the foreseeable future. I'm looking for one that isn't too expensive as I am a poor college student. When it comes to Raid cards I'm pretty much a noob so please help.

[Electronics Wizardy]

If this for a boot array or non boot?

 

What drives and how many?

 

Id probably just use software raid here, its bettter for most uses for a setup like this.

[leadeater]

Even if the CMOS gets cleared the array won't be lost. The RAID info is written the header of the disks so in that event just enable the SATA RAID mode and it'll detect the existing array on the disks.

 

If you are going to increase the disks from 2 in a RAID 1 mirror then I would get a RAID card for that purpose though.

[thedangerine]

31 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

If this for a boot array or non boot?

 

What drives and how many?

 

Id probably just use software raid here, its bettter for most uses for a setup like this.

At the moment I have 2 seagate ironwolfs and will likely have 3 or 4 by the end of the year, and sometime in the following year I hope to have up to 6. I should've mentioned in the original post but when I get more drives I will be switching to a raid 5. These are not being used for a boot drive, rather like an archive of all my data.

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, AdvancedMicroDisapointment said:

At the moment I have 2 seagate ironwolfs and will likely have 3 or 4 by the end of the year, and sometime in the following year I hope to have up to 6. I should've mentioned in the original post but when I get more drives I will be switching to a raid 5. These are not being used for a boot drive, rather like an archive of all my data.

If you're using Windows then Storage Spaces is an option for you, turn off SATA RAID on the motherboard then create the storage pool in Windows. Cheaper than buying a RAID card and not hardware dependent either.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, AdvancedMicroDisapointment said:

At the moment I have 2 seagate ironwolfs and will likely have 3 or 4 by the end of the year, and sometime in the following year I hope to have up to 6. I should've mentioned in the original post but when I get more drives I will be switching to a raid 5. These are not being used for a boot drive, rather like an archive of all my data.

So then Id use storage spaces in windows. Its more flexable and lets you add drive easier, and you can easily add things like a ssd tier. Also you can easily move it to anouther system. If you need more drive conenctors get a hba like a dell h200.

[thedangerine]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

So then Id use storage spaces in windows. Its more flexable and lets you add drive easier, and you can easily add things like a ssd tier. Also you can easily move it to anouther system. If you need more drive conenctors get a hba like a dell h200.

 

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

If you're using Windows then Storage Spaces is an option for you, turn off SATA RAID on the motherboard then create the storage pool in Windows. Cheaper than buying a RAID card and not hardware dependent either.

I'll have to give that a try. Not having to buy a pricey raid card would be pretty great