IDE RAID - Which controller?

[Paulr]

Just out of interest people which is the best IDE RAID controller to purchase?
We need to set up a quite cheap server and we are thinking an array of IDE drives is going to be a lot cheaper than going the SCSI route.
Yes we know performance isn't the same, but anyway in your opinion which is the best to go for?
On a more personal line, considering I've got 2x 45GB IBM ATA-100 units in my home system RAID might be quite nice there too for that added disk performance.
Same controller or recommendations again.
Tar.

[Greebe]

The Promise.

[SCompRacer]

Putting together PC for friend using a Promise FastTrak100 RAID Controller card. Stuck it in my KT7A RAID board, disabling the Highpoint just to try it. Did not want to totally strip everything out so I left all cards/drives in, removing only the Promise card when I enabled the Highpoint.
Benched both using two 30GB IBM 75GXP's in RAID 0, clean install (for each controller) of Win98SE, VIA 4 in 1 4.28v(a), drivers for video card, latest drivers for each controller, no drivers for any cards not recognized by Windows (SB Live & Hollywood +), SCSI card used Win98SE drivers, NIC card disabled as it can lower scores anywhere from 329 to 728 points.

Ran SiSoft three times for each, defragging before each test and rebooting. Performance of both was close in the 45,000 range, the edge going to the Highpoint.

The Promise did 45,319, 45,250 and 45,228 for an average of 45,266.
The Highpoint did 45,331, 45,434 and 45,403 for an average of 45,389.

While performance may not be much different, some issues with the Highpoint have been getting it to work with RAID'ed drives on IDE 3 & 4 with 4 PCI cards. They install a Promise card and they have no problems.



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ABIT KT7A, RAID 0 * 900MHz Athlon T'bird * 256MB Crucial 7E PC/133 RAM * Two 30GB IBM 75GXP * Two Cheetah LVD's * Barracuda UW * DiamondMAX IDE * Plextor Ultraplex 40max/Plexwriter 12/4/32 * Hitachi IDE DVD * 2940U2W * SB Live * 3Com 905B-TX NIC * 3Com Courier V. Ext. * Hollywood + * Win 98SE, Win 2000 *

[Gurm]

The Highpoint may benchmark higher, but its concurrency is so bad as to be laughable. The Promise is substantially better, although still a far cry from anything Intel can do. In order of best concurrency, I would rate the various controllers:

VIA
Highpoint
AMD
Promise
Intel

But since VIA, AMD, and Intel don't make RAID... that leaves Promise.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Rags]

Promise.

Rags

[EchoWars]

Inexpensive too..if you buy a Promise Ultra100 controller card for $20 on Ebay, and hack it to a RAID controller with two short wires and two 120 Ohm resistors.

[Paulr]

Going back to RAID for a more personal use.
If I wanted redundency then RAID would be excellent, set up mirroring etc.
However what kind of general disk access performance have people seen using RAID 0?
If it's just figures you want, does RAID 0 really make that much difference?
The drawback of course is if one disk fails you loose everything, are the performance inceases worth the extra risk?

[Dr Mordrid]

The KT7-RAID is one of only 3 mainboards Matrox specifically recommends NOT to use with the RT-2000, and the HighPoint controller is one big reason why. It causes a lot of problems and I refuse to use one again. Yes, I tried one and it was a mess.

Dr. Mordrid

[cjolley]

I wonder what the errors with the HighPoint are?
My Abit BE6-II V2 has a highPoint controller & it has operated totally transparently through several sets of vid, sound and controller driver updates for me.
Could it be just a VIA chipset problem?
chuck


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ABit BE6-2 V2, P3-650@923, 256mb@142cas3, 90gig (2x45) IBM 75GXP striped raid array, SB Live Value@3.0, Pioneer 104s DVD, Mitsumi CDRW@2x2x8, Acatel 1000 ADSL@1.5mb/sec, Linksys EtherFast NIC, LG 995e, USB mouse,Matrox G400 MAX!!!!

[Greebe]

cj, Doc's experience with the Highpoint are with video editing specifically in mind. This constitutes a much high strain on it's proformance and or compatability than anyother.

[Guyver]

Odd...

I am interested in finding out about what the problems are with the hpt370 controller.

I'm currently running my ABIT BX133-RAID with Highpoint hpt370 controller with ZERO problems. No latency issues, no drive errors, and extremely high performance.

This is with a 4-drive array of 20GB drives running as 1 40GB drive.

Guyver

[SCompRacer]

Other than PhotoShop and 3DSM loading real fast and gee-whiz hard drive benches, I don't really need it. I didn't have the money to upgrade all my outdated LVD hard drives to the newer 160 standard so I went with IDE RAID.

I just make regular images using PQ Drive Image like I always have on the in case. Not real good about saving to CD though.

[Gurm]

The problem with the highpoint, traditionally, has been threefold:

1. Doesn't like some drives. Various BIOS versions make this better or worse. Some drives just don't show up, or show up as the wrong size.

2. Incompatible with other devices. This is hit-or-miss, and might be VIA chipset related.

3. Concurrency. What I mean by this is the following: drag a REALLY BIG FILE from one drive to another. You should be able to play a game without slowdown while this is going on. The drive controller SHOULD use only a couple percent of the CPU. THe highpoint routinely uses substantially more than this.

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[Liquid Snake]

<A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200102/20010214ST1000_vs_Escalade_1.html">Here</A> is a review comparing the 3Ware Escalade 6400 to the Promise SuperTrak100. These cards are not cheap though. The Promise Fasttrak100 is cheaper, and geared toward performance, according to Promise.