Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Comparison of Nine SATA RAID 5 Adapters

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-can-never-have-enough-storage-space dept.

Robbedoeske writes "Tweakers.net has put online a comparison of nine Serial ATA RAID 5 adapters. Can the establishment counter the attack of the newcomers? Which of the contestants delivers the best performance, offers the best value for money and has the best featureset?"

6 of 221 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting that the 3ware offerings performed... by tabkey12 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    quite badly! They've been synonymous with quality in the RAID industry for many years. Look at this:

    3ware Escalade 8506-8 is lagging far behind the competition. Moreover, it misses important features such as online capacity expansion, online RAID level migration and RAID 50 support.

    http://www.tweakers.net/reviews/557/6

    What they say in the article is almost damning really...

    --
    Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
  2. Re:32 pages? No thanks. by tabkey12 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But RAID is nota one size fits all game - the detail of the article is extremely useful for people who will be tailoring their RAID to a specific application. Yes, this article is specialised, but I hardly see how reducing it to a list of three, relatively meaningless names is helping.

    --
    Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
  3. Don't plan on mixing Highpoint cards by GoodNicsTken · · Score: 5, Informative

    I had a Rocket Raid 100 (IDE 4 drive RAID1/0) and a RocketRaid 1640 (4 Channel SATA RAID 0,1,5) card. With nothing connected to the 1640 and 2 mirrored drives on the RR 100 the disks attached to the RR100 in bios show up on the 1640, and when windows gets to the boot screen it locks up.

    When I removed the drives in windows, it booted up without problems. Highpoint has sent me diag tools to run rather than building this in their lab!

    I'm not too impressed with them so far.

  4. Re:Eight or Nine? by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Funny
    TFA says nine adapters, but the graphic says eight, whoops.

    It was a parity bit, ignore it.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  5. SCSI vs SATA by sjbe · · Score: 5, Informative

    SCSI, in its current form, is just opening itself up to becoming antiquated.

    Perhaps, though personally I've had far more trouble getting SATA (and IDE) drives to work than SCSI drives and I've used both extensively. Driver issues mostly. SCSI's performance is better in multi-user systems, it's easy to set up, drivers tend to be less problematic especially on systems other than Windows, and it can have more devices attached. People claim it's more reliable though I have no evidence of this, and frankly am a bit dubious of the claim. SATA is also easy to set up and is a lot cheaper, though the drivers are still less ubiquitous than with SCSI and performance doesn't match SCSI yet for multi-user systems. (on a single user system it doesn't matter much)

    That said, the next generation of SCSI is Serial Attached SCSI which is compatible with SATA. A SAS controller will be able to use SATA drives if you don't need the extra features of SAS. SCSI isn't going away, it's just adapting.

  6. Beware hardware RAID by puke76 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Sure everyone buys a few spare drives.. but make sure you buy more than one RAID card. If the RAID card goes, unless you replace it with an identical make and model, you can kiss your data goodbye.

    That's what I like about software RAID on Linux - you can mount the array on another linux box if you need to.

    Have yet to see a good comparison between low-end hardware RAID and Linux software RAID..

    --
    London's finest organic fairtrade coffee