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Good RAID-1 hardware controller ?

Started by Yann L 2 replies 2.8k views
Original Post
Yann L
Yann L
Hey, After a critical harddrive failure on my home PC a few weeks ago, I'm seriously looking into building a RAID-1 system, ie. mirroring two identical hard drives. Can anyone recommend a good (= reliable, fast) controller setup for this ? Either as an additional PCI card, or as part of a mainboard (Socket 939, compatible with the FX-57) ? I'm only interested in fully transparent hardware solutions, that are 100% OS independent (ie. that would present themselves as a single HDD to the OS). Hotswapping would be a plus, but is not required. Any suggestions, experiences, or horror stories about RAID 1 solutions ?
tstrimp
tstrimp
Pretty much any decent socket 939 board supports raid 0/1 . What other requirements are there?

Edit: As far as brands go I am partial to Gigabyte. They aren't the fastest around but the features and reliability give me warm fuzzies.
Yann L
Yann L
Quote:
Original post by tstrimp
Pretty much any decent socket 939 board supports raid 0/1 . What other requirements are there?

Are those cheap onboard controllers really hardware RAID systems ? I remember that mirroring used to be software emulated by the drivers, by writing to two harddisks connected to two independent controllers / channels simulatenously. Maybe they changed that on newer chipsets though ?
tstrimp
tstrimp
This is the mobo I'm going to get next. It has an integrated Silicon Image Sil3114 which I believe is a dedicated raid card. www.tomshardware.com had this to say about it.

Quote:
The Sil3114 has been on the market about as long as the TX4 from Promise, but is somewhat superior - the chip supports the simple RAID modes 0 and 1 as well as 1+0.

While Promise is clearly targeting the end customer (semi-professional and professional users), Silicon Image has more success in integration and with corporate customers. Thus it happens that numerous products are based on the Sil3114 and this chip has already been in use integrated on motherboards.


Not a lot to go off of I know.

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