Good SAS Raid Controller, 8 ports?

[IronWarrior]

I was thinking of getting the Adaptec RAID 5805 but have been told it takes like 45 seconds to boot up and can overheat.

Am new to the world of RAID controllers, so is there any card out there that is fast to boot up and has 8 SAS ports and not overheat?

[Serra]

Any particular budget?

Incidentally, the way to avoid an overheat is just to point a fan at the card... a lot of cards just have heatsinks on them but are designed for servers where they will see forced airflow. Don't ask me why they wouldn't ship it with a removable fan, but the industry as a whole seems to feel this is acceptable.

[IronWarrior]

Hmm, 500 to 600.

[swiftex]

45 seconds, my nerves
it runs hot, nothing a fan wouldn't fix
i have a few,
look into areca for they make a good product

[binormalkilla]

Perc 5 can be found for ~$100 on ebay. I run 4 drive RAID 0 and 4 drive RAID5 on mine. It's an excellent controller. You can upgrade the memory from 256MB (ECC) to 512MB if you see fit.

BTW this card runs hot too. I took an Enzotech SB cooler and glued it on using Arctic Silver adhesive. Runs great now.
It takes around 30-45s to initialize this card.....but what's the big deal? If you're OCIng and POSTing over and over just disconnect the card while you test, then reconnect to load OS.

[tiro_uspsss]

Perc 5 can be found for ~$100 on ebay. I run 4 drive RAID 0 and 4 drive RAID5 on mine. It's an excellent controller. You can upgrade the memory from 256MB (ECC) to 512MB if you see fit.

BTW this card runs hot too. I took an Enzotech SB cooler and glued it on using Arctic Silver adhesive. Runs great now.
It takes around 30-45s to initialize this card.....but what's the big deal? If you're OCIng and POSTing over and over just disconnect the card while you test, then reconnect to load OS.

I dont think PERC5 has 8 ports(?)

I'd highly recommend Areca

[icywater]

Perc 5i sux, it has throughput cap, can't exceed 300MB/s.

[Serra]

Perc 5i sux, it has throughput cap, can't exceed 300MB/s.

While I'm not posting to defend this product (given I have never owned or used one), they can indeed exceed 300MB/s... there's just some sort of shenanegans you have to play with them. I looked really closely at them at one point, and with updated LSI firmware + drivers I saw some benches that were extremely convincing. Well over 300MB/s throughput. May have had some interesting loading requirements, but I don't quite remember.

That said, they use an IOP333. And while they have *the best* price for an IOP333 out there, if you plan on going SSD with this card it's not for you.

Edit: Decent review of the card: http://www.overclock.net/hard-drives...card-tips.html
(note 450MB/s throughput on one of his read tests w/ 4x 1TB Samsung F1's. I'm sure I've seen over 600 somewhere as well... but again, I have this tickle at the back of my mind telling me there was something different about it requiring sufficient requests for some reason... though that might be me just going crazy...)

[tiro_uspsss]

I was thinking of getting the Adaptec RAID 5805 but have been told it takes like 45 seconds to boot up and can overheat.

Am new to the world of RAID controllers, so is there any card out there that is fast to boot up and has 8 SAS ports and not overheat?

get ARC-1680ix-12

this is Areca card, has 12 SAS ports, dual-core 1.2Ghz XOR, & can have up to 4GB cache

why 12 port? cause u should probably get a lil expandability

[binormalkilla]

I dont think PERC5 has 8 ports(?)

I'd highly recommend Areca

It has 2 SAS channels, so you can run 8 SATA drives directly or up to something like 256 SAS drives using expanders.

Perc 5i sux, it has throughput cap, can't exceed 300MB/s.

Where did you get that from? 8 drive RAID5 array:

[NapalmV5]

get ARC-1680ix-12

this is Areca card, has 12 SAS ports, dual-core 1.2Ghz XOR, & can have up to 4GB cache

why 12 port? cause u should probably get a lil expandability

yeh but the 1680 is no faster @ boot up than the 5805

unfortunately thats the world of raid controllers

pain in the arse at times still the benefits outway the issues

[tiro_uspsss]

yeh but the 1680 is no faster @ boot up than the 5805

unfortunately thats the world of raid controllers

pain in the arse at times still the benefits outway the issues

never said it was

[NapalmV5]

yeh but im referring to 1st post ^

ironwarrior dont like 45 sec long initialization lol

[IronWarrior]

yeh but im referring to 1st post ^

ironwarrior dont like 45 sec long initialization lol

Yeah but who does? :/

tiro_uspsss, thanks for the suggestion, I have looked at that card but 12 ports is is a little too much.

But this seems to be the same model but 8 ports instead and has a fan and it is low profile as well, which I want.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Areca...andor-on-board

In the RAID controller industry, who is like the top dog, am thinking it's Adaptec?

[icywater]

Where did you get that from? 8 drive RAID5 array:

lol, for some reason i can't not get my card to run over 300MB/s, on both P5K-E and P5Q-Pro.

[NapalmV5]

Yeah but who does? :/

tiro_uspsss, thanks for the suggestion, I have looked at that card but 12 ports is is a little too much.

But this seems to be the same model but 8 ports instead and has a fan and it is low profile as well, which I want.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Areca...andor-on-board

In the RAID controller industry, who is like the top dog, am thinking it's Adaptec?

yeh no one.. never said i did lol

all these sas controllers are meant @ servers/workstations.. once setup/booted they stay on very long periods of time.. users could care less about bootup times


i dont think the low profile 1680 is any faster @ boot up.. maybe 1-5 sec

[IronWarrior]

yeh no one.. never said i did lol

all these sas controllers are meant @ servers/workstations.. once setup/booted they stay on very long periods of time.. users could care less about bootup times


i dont think the low profile 1680 is any faster @ boot up.. maybe 1-5 sec

Roger that.

Just to give further information, am planning on adding 2 SSD's, 2 Cheetahs and 4 WD RE3's to this card.

[Serra]

lol, for some reason i can't not get my card to run over 300MB/s, on both P5K-E and P5Q-Pro.

Like I mentioned there are some shenanigans with that card - are you running Dell or LSI firmware / drivers?

In the RAID controller industry, who is like the top dog, am thinking it's Adaptec?

Depends on who you ask. LSI may be one of the biggest names though, IBM and a few other very large companies use them at least nearly exclusively... I think IBM recently even went with them for their supercomputers. But Areca is a top-tier name brand as well.

What it really boils down to ultimately are 2 things: what chip are they using and how are their drivers. Well, and maybe their interface... but ideally you shouldn't have to play with it every day so that's not as big of a deal to me. Any top-tier RAID company should be fine for drivers, after that it's just the chip they're using. A number of companies (such as Areca) use Intel IOP's and as a result their benchmarks with the same hardware/settings are usually about the same. Other companies (ie. LSI) use custom chips, the bother of which is that benchmarks are much rarer (well, benchmarks with software packages we use anyway).

[alfaunits]

Which top OEM like Dell/IBM/HP uses Areca?

[Speederlander]

Which top OEM like Dell/IBM/HP uses Areca?

You're really on a death to Areca kick.

[WonderSausage]

I have had mixed experience with Areca. The 1680 has expandable cache but the benchmarks are lower than the Adaptec 5805 and it's more expensive as well.

I currently have multiple Adaptec and LSI systems in prodution and use an Adaptec 5805 in my personal gaming workstation. The BIOS initialization is definitely longer on the 5805 than on one of the dumb LSI SAS HBAs but it's solid as a rock and the performance is stellar.

From now on I am going Adaptec exclusively because while I've always had good reliability and acceptable performance with LSI, lately I've had a lot of BIOS issues with modern Intel chipsets (X38/X48 and now X58) where on various motherboards & certain slots, either the LSI adapter BIOS won't initialize at all, or it will initialize and accept the key combo to enter the RAID utility (with the message that the utility will load at the end of POST) but the system just goes ahead and boots without ever loading the utility.

Not only do the current Adaptec units, including the 5805, not have any of these BIOS issues on Intel chipsets but they include a "force load RAID utility now" option (which I've never had to use, but it's nice to know it's there).

The final straw with LSI was on Asus boards their x4 adapters were only getting initialized at x1. I actually had to buy & keep on hand 3 WD Caviar Black drives to set up in RAID 0 every time I built a system with an LSI controller to verify that it was getting initialized at x4 (since the LSI MegaRAID software utility doesn't tell you, you can only tell by using an array with >250MBps throughput).

Anyway, long story short, the 5805 + BBU rocks.

WS

[alfaunits]

You're really on a death to Areca kick.

With so many issues with their controllers, I should be considered quiet
If they're top tier, I don't want to know bottom c***

[SoulsCollective]

I can vouch for both the 5805, or, if you'd like to spend a little more and don't want to worry about overheating, I've used Highpoint 35xx cards in a number of builds now, and they're great, very quick bootup and great performance. Slightly smaller cache and use a single-core Intel IOP rather than the Adaptec dual-core, which results in the same read speed but faster write speeds compared to the other card, but means that even with no airflow the card never overheats.

[alfaunits]

P.S. Areca also takes a minute+ to boot.

[swiftex]

With so many issues with their controllers, I should be considered quiet
If they're top tier, I don't want to know bottom c***

I actually appreciate the knowing real life uses and issues of products.

This is what it's all about for better or worse.

Thanks!