That's great info, thank you.
You're welcome. Glad it helped.
After thinking about it a little more, I don't really need RAID 50 if I'm going to be booting off of an SSD and just using the RAID array as storage. I might as well find a cheaper card that just supports 1,5,10.
The ARC-1213 4i will be the best you can do for a card that works in a MP, and comes in under $400 (does levels 0,1,10,3,5,6 and JBOD). Which is any standard level possible with 4x drives.
Brands in general are limited to begin with, and the two to look at are Areca and ATTO. Of the two, Areca is less expensive, but is still a proper RAID card (support is overseas, and the interface requires the use of a web browser to access). ATTO's support is located in the US, and their interface is a little nicer to look at and a bit easier to use. That's it, but the ATTO will cost you more money as a result.
Speaking of booting off an SSD, what do you think of the Apricorn Velocity Solo X2? I've heard it's not full 6gb/s speeds, but still much faster than SATAII. Plus, I like the option of putting a second SSD in the optical bay if I need to expand.
Your limit will be the SATA port in the MP the SSD is connected to (SATA II, which saturates at ~250-275MB/s real world), and the entire controller has a limit of ~660MB/s for all the drives (i.e. if you striped a couple of SSD's, you'd hit the SATA controller's bandwidth limit before you ever reached the max the set would be capable of).
There is no real raid card that's going to do raid 5 for much cheaper than the Areca 1213-4i. Maybe one of the highpoint cards. You will see a big price jump between these cards and the cheaper ones they offer, but they aren't true hardware raid cards. Most decent cards offering raid 5 will also do raid 50.
Depends on the drive count in this case, as though the controller is capable, there just aren't enough drives. With a SAS expander (on models that work with them), it's possible at that point.
But the ARC-1213 doesn't, and is one of the compromises it has vs. it's bigger brothers.
And I know this is bad but I've had WD caviar black WD2002FAEX drives in both an ATTO R348 and now an Areca 1213-4i and they do work.
What is the configuration (level)?
I ask, as they can be used reliably for 0,1,10, and JBOD. But once you try to use them with parity levels, you're basically playing Russian Roulette with your array (seen this many times by users that didn't heed the use of Enterprise drives).
Granted, so long as there's a proper backup, it's just time lost. But when you get into the recurring errors, that's a PITA at best, and can actually be what kills the drives (error, rebuild; wash, rinse, repeat, until enough damage occurs that one drive too many fail during the rebuild and *poof* the array is shot). Bad sectors accumulate during all of this, causing them to be too unstable or even defective (even remapped and used as a single disk).
Not specific to a particular brand, but Seagates have given me the most trouble over the last 4 years, including their enterprise line. Switched to WD for SATA back in 2008, and haven't had the problems I was seeing with Seagate (Hitachi isn't that wonderful in my experience either for enterprise models).
I bought them back before I knew any better, and have been waiting for them to fail so I can get the RE4 drives... but still going OK. I did have one head crash which was replaced under RMA but I think was unrelated.
Up to you, but you can always re-purpose those drives for say backup or archival storage before they're damaged.
Just a thought.
