I'm trying to hook up (4) 320gb SATA hard drives with a RAID card or anything else that will work.

1/20/2007 10:08:20 PM

I picked up a Rosewill off Newegg for twenty-odd bucks, so far, so good... running 4 Maxtors (2x 300, 2x 320). Haven't yet used its RAID function.
The driver CD was junk though, had to go to Silicon Image's website to get a driver that worked.

it's a SATA I, though, a SATA II will run about $100.

the RC-209
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16816132006

1/20/2007 10:22:59 PM

I can't recommend a specific card, but do read reviews thoroughly and carefully. A cheap ass RAID card can kill your data in a hurry if it decides to take a crap. A little piece of mind is worth paying a little extra and buying a quality piece of hardware.

1/21/2007 1:20:30 AM

buy a raid card that does HARDWARE RAID, not through the drivers... that is of course if the data means a lot to you.

1/21/2007 10:13:25 AM

Personally I'd go with the cheapest driver RAID you can find that isn't known to spontaneously combust. There is little risk correlated with the cost of a RAID controller, save for the presence of a battery-backed cache. Hardware RAID is utterly fucking pointless for anything but a highly loaded server that needs low latency directly attached storage, with low CPU overhead. Your desktop does not share that need, and you'd do best to ignore these techno-ricers who indicate otherwise.

Most cost effective way to do this would be to use software RAID on your chipset-integrated SATA which probably has a dedicated on-chip bus and will not be bottlenecked by your PCI bus. Unless you have PCI-X or PCI Express and didn't mention it. For software RAID you need enough bus bandwidth to avoid bottlenecking array reconstruction -- reconstruction is when RAID is most vulernable to data loss and you want to minimize reconstruction time.

You haven't really given enough information about your intended use or current configuration to make specific recommendations, to be honest, though.

1/21/2007 2:05:26 PM

so far tiberius is winning this thread

1/21/2007 2:42:48 PM