ServeTheHome – Intel Xeon AMD Opteron RAID Controller Reviews

The HP Smart Array P411 is a fairly inexpensive 6.0gbps SAS 2 and SATA III controller. To enhance performance, the HP Smart Array P411 has a variety of cache options available. This is a quick guide installing a 512MB DRAM plus BBU kit to the controller. A similar setup must be used in order to do things like flash the HP SAS Expander with new firmware. Continue Reading

One question I am often asked is what do I think about port multipliers. The short story here is that I think they can be valuable and I can see that they have a place in the market. The Silicon Image SiI3124 controller is an inexpensive SATA II controller that runs natively on a PCI-X bus. One of the biggest draws to the Silicon Image port-multiplier enabled ecosystems is cost. For about $100 one can purchase a controller and a port multiplier (based on the SiI3726 for example) and provide eight ports of connectivity. This low-cost architecture has been something that Silicon Image has been building for years. Continue Reading

A commonly asked question is what makes up a good RAID controller. There are many purveyors of RAID cards out there that will sell a FakeRAID solution supporting RAID 5 or RAID 6 for a premium. Continue Reading

With Windows Home Server 2011 coming out in the near future many less experienced home users are looking into RAID subsystems to create larger storage pools. This is a segment where without a very solid basic understanding of what the technologies involved are, a user can make a purchasing decision detrimental to their machine’s ultimate performance and data security. It is important that a user understands the relative strengths and weaknesses of different RAID philosophies, software RAID, “Fake-RAID”, and hardware RAID. Continue Reading

With Windows Home Server 2011 and Windows Small Business Server 2011 Essentials both having recent release candidates indicating an imminent release, I thought it would be wise to take a minute to show how to setup a RAID 1 array using the Intel ICH which is found on most modern LGA 1155, LGA 1156 and LGA 1366 Intel motherboards. With very widespread support, the Intel RAID 1 provides at least a decent solution for Windows Home Server 2011 users that would like redundancy under the new operating system. Using RAID 1 arrays, users can setup redundant mirrors of disks so that if one fails, the other disk can be used (oftentimes called mirroring.) Be forewarned, this is a very simple guide, and there are a lot of other options out there in the world of RAID, but this is the easiest way to setup a RAID 1 array for a lot of users. Continue Reading

It is a well known practice that many vendors re-brand LSI RAID cards and host bus adapters (HBAs) using different firmware and re-sell them as their own. Oftentimes, re-branded cards are less expensive to acquire than their LSI counterparts making re-brands highly desirable. Continue Reading

A lot of users on this site, and of Windows Home Server, FreeNAS and OpenSolaris look for compatible RAID controllers that are both supported and inexpensive. For these users, both the older SAS 3.0 and SATA II LSI 1068e chipet and the newer LSI SAS 2008 are favorites. The LSI 1068e was an extremely popular RAID chipset that has the ability to be flashed to IT firmware to turn the controllers into (more or less) SAS Expander aware host bus adapters (HBAs). It is supported under most operating systems and was used by many OEM vendors. Continue Reading

Since publishing the Intel SASUC8I and LSI SAS3081E-R 1068e Based RAID Controller Review I have received quite a few questions regarding how to flash the LSI IT firmware to the Intel card. This guide shows one how to get around the sasflash utility’s vendor check. Continue Reading

With the rise of Windows Home Server, VAIL, Aurora, the venerable Linux file servers (e.g. ones based on CentOS and Openfiler), and ZFS enabled OSes such as FreeBSD and OpenSolaris with their NAS derivatives (e.g. FreeNAS and EON ZFS Storage), users have a strong alternative to hardware RAID controllers. These operating systems have the ability to use raw disks and manage data redundancy without the use of RAID controllers.

For smaller installations, such as 2-6 drive configurations, onboard Intel ICH10 or ICH10R controllers are a best bet due to their compatibility and very low cost. When drive counts expand, so must the servers SATA port count. With traditional RAID controllers, a user is limited to including ports physically located on the storage controller. Therefore to connect fourteen drives a user typically needs a sixteen port or greater RAID card because hardware RAID arrays generally cannot span different controllers. Using a software RAID or RAID-like solution one is not limited by these barriers and can utilize ports on motherboards as well as on add-in controllers. Continue Reading