Which Sata Raid Controller is recommended for server use?

I am planning to get some Raptor Sata drives. I heard they are fast
and reliable (any better ones?). I need to decide which Sata Raid
controller to get. This will be used in a full size case in Windows
2003. It will be used in a possibly high traffic web server. My budget
is $400.

Any recommendations?

 

On 4/13/2009 10:56 PM, Tony Barken wrote:
> Any recommendations?

I have used Promise, Hi-Point, and 3Ware SATA RAID cards.

The Hi-Point is ok, but the card that I used had a problem where the
driver would take longer and longer to load on system boot (and
ultimately time out) based on the drive size.

One of my clients has a Promise 4310 SATA RAID card that is "Ok". They
recently experienced a failure where one of the drives sort of failed in
such a way that the RAID card tried to auto-recover and fail, rinse
lather repeat. To get the client so that they could limp along I had to
manually fail (disconnect) the problematic drive so that the RAID would
simply degrade and run much closer to normal. I will also say that the
BIOS of the 4310 (in a word) *SUCKS*. The only way that I could get any
information was to go in WebPAM (Promise Array Manager) with the system
up and running. Which if you are having problems booting the system...

I have a colleague that swears by 3Ware RAID cards. He was managing a
3.5 TB RAID 5 and had fairly good luck with it. According to him, both
the BIOS *and* the utilities were very good. Granted he was running
Linux, but I suspect that the card and utilities would be equally as
good (if not better) under Windows.

I have not looked for one, but I would be very interested to see if
there were any Compaq (HP) SmartARRAY cards for SATA drives. I have
been *EXTREMELY* impressed with any thing SmartARRAY 2 (or higher). I
can do on the fly (while files are open) resizing of the logical drives,
convert between one RAID type to another, add drives to the array,
expand the array (replace a smaller drive with a larger drive). You
name it and I've done it with SmartARRAY controllers. I don't know if
there is a SmartARRAY for SATA drives or not, but if there was and it
was with in your budge, I would *STRONGLY* suggest that you *SERIOUSLY*
consider it.

I suppose you could also look at a SAS RAID controller and put SATA
drives under it.



Grant. . . .