Cheap Raid controller for Raid 10..

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Clitty

New Member
Oct 2, 2015
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Hi, I'm bit of a raid card noob. Please be nice. Looking for raid card for a simple home server/partners machine.

I'd like to buy a raid card to do raid 10 8 x 4tb hard drives and not sure where to start. i tried a silverstone sst- ecs04 and it would only allow me to do raid 0. The card may have been faulty, I've rma it so see what happens there. In the mean time I'm looking at better options as there was bugger all information out there for the silverstone card.

I'm running this raid setup on a Threadripper 1900x and asrock Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming. Using 10Gbit between 2 computers

my requirements are 1. Able to do raid 10 (quicker always better)
2. Window 10 compatible
3. Easy to use or have clear documentation. No bios flashing or anything, just want to plug and play
4. cheap

Does such a card exist?? I'II resort to buying a more expensive card if it means it's easy to use and it's a simply plug and play

Thanks people
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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Most of the HBAs we usually use for ZFS come with the firmware for RAID modes. You could likely use one of those to manage a RAID10 setup. They are cheap and can do 8 SATA or SAS drives with inexpensive cables. Windows also has built in support for RAID10 if you want to go with a software based setup. I don't know how the cards perform compared to a software setup, but it's an option.
 

RTM

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2014
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That Silverstone card should support RAID 10, but if the RMA leads nowhere, perhaps you can reflash it to original LSI/Broadcom SAS2308 IR firmware, I know you don't want to do that, but just saying it's an option if you change your mind.

Another option is to use whatever it is your motherboard supports (probably a variety of software raid on chipsets aka fakeraid), as you are using WIndows it should be fairly well supported. If you are already using some of its ports, perhaps you can buy a cheap SATA controller like something with an asmedia or marvell controller.

With regards to Windows 10 supported and cheap, you may want to look at their built-in software RAID, it's called storage spaces.
Hey brother,

If you don't wanna deal with flashing and stuff, just grab yourself a LSI 9211-8i on eBay. This is a 2nd Gen LSI card, good for 6Gbps. You dont need a third gen card for Hard Drives, the 2nd Gen cards will do. Plus they are dirt cheap, as you can find most sellers selling them anywhere between $25-$40 bucks. This card comes with stock LSI firmware installed. Then LSI/Broadcom has a windows based utility to update the firmware, so you dont have to mess with dos flashing utilities and firmware's, etc.
sas2008 cards like the 9211-8i are generally nice and cheap, but I think it is about time we stop recommending people to buy them (at least not without a warning), as drivers for it have been removed from ESXi 7.0 and RHEL 8 (i know OP is using Windows 10, but it indicates that support may disappear soon generally, and thus may not be what people should invest in).
 

RTM

Well-Known Member
Jan 26, 2014
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I hear you brother, but I dont agree. Please bear with me as I rant for a little bit!
....
It is cool, you are certainly entitled to your own opinion, so don't sweat it ;)

But I think you missed my point, let me just quote myself
.... as drivers for it have been removed from ESXi 7.0 and RHEL 8 (i know OP is using Windows 10, but it indicates that support may disappear soon generally, and thus may not be what people should invest in).
Just to spell it out, RHEL/CentOS 8 started with removing support for the SAS2008 controller (it is important because it is probably the primary enterprise linux distro) and now recently VMware removed support in ESXi 7.0. It may yet be a little early to call it a trend, but I think it at least deserve a small warning when recommended, so people considering SAS2008 based cards are aware of it when making decisions on what to get (obviously in many cases SAS2008 cards will be cheap enough that it does not matter).

And yeah... if we need to continue this discussion, it should probably be in a separate thread.
 
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