discussion raid controller question....

[rob123]

as 1 member here can atest to i am absolutely brutal to my hard drives. i usually go through several each year. i hit upon raid as a possible way to avoid data loss.

i have seen the following controller on ebay

ADAPTEC 2610SA 6 PORT SATA RAID CARD DELL,

anyway i have looked around and am unable to find info on wether or not it will fit into a regular pci slot. would be nice as this is just about the only reasonably priced hardware raid card that can do raid 5

looking to set up at least a 2 TB raid 5 array.

thx for any help

rob123

 

[pscout]

I am not familiar with that card.

i have been using raid 1 for a few years on my main rig and backup.
With some of my early rigs using a cheap SI raid card which also let me run large drives on rigs whene the bios didn't support them.

lately i have setup a few raid 5's using both the ich7r and ich8r on p5b-d and p5wdh mobos.

The only thing with the integrated ones is the max number of drives on a bootable volume is 4 although the ich8r supports 6 sata ports. The other 2 could be setup as a non bootable volume.

These p5b-d also includes a jmicron raind for another 2 drive raid.

I have had no trouble with intel raid for > 3 years since my first one on an ich5r asus mobo.

I usually have more than 1 rig with ich7r or 8r so if i get a hardware failure i can still access the raid 5 drives from another rig. In fact i just had to do this in the last week due to a dead mobo.

You would need very big drives tho to get to 2 TB on this setup. And i hate to use raid 1 on the 2 drive configs ... although drives are pretty cheap these days.

Raid 1 is actually very useful for moving data since you can move one of the drives to another rig to copy, then plug it back in to rebuild. But raid 5 is much more economical.

 

[MarshallX]

That card will fit in a PCI 32-bit slot but will run at a clock of 33MHz or 66MHz with the PCI 2.1 spec. You loose the speed advantage of the 64 bit slot.