need help choosing a raid controller card for my server

[kaitlin4599]

so i currently have a supermicro x9dri-ln4f+ motherboard inside a fractal define 7XL with 6 8TB SATA HDD's. i was going to use a dell PERC H700 cards but it doesnt seem to like my board and gives me loads of beep errors while i do have a 2.5 inch sata ssd for the windows 11 os i need a raid card with onbaord cache support 512mb or better what options do i have? the reason my dell card doesnt work is an smb bus issue

 

[nexox]

You can possibly tape over the smbus pins on the PCIe connector to make the Dell card work, aside from that I don't have any recommendations, I left hardware RAID behind like a decade ago.

 

[louie1961]

Why hardware RAID? I agree with nexox.

 

[TrevorH]

Also, if you aim to use a hardware RAID card I think you can do a lot better than an H700 as those are ancient.

 

[kapone]

Why hardware RAID? I agree with nexox.

 

[nexox]

I didn't mean to say nobody should use hardware RAID, I just didn't want to mention the tape thing without addressing OP's question in some way.

 

[louie1961]

Well since he is using a desktop case, I assumed he is not going to be using tape, or really any other use case where HW RAID would be more desirable than software RAID. But perhaps that is a bad assumption on my part.

 

[nexox]

Insulating tape on the SMBUS contacts on the RAID card, not magnetic tape storage.

 

[i386]

Why hardware RAID?

I say this as someone who loves windows (client and server): Windows integrated software raid (raid 0/1/5 only) and storage spaces (limited flexibility/fixed column size, "slow" write performance, requires fiddling with powershell for advanced settings) sucks

 

[twin_savage]

Hardware raid is a fine choice under many different edge scenarios.

Look into Areca cards, they've become my favorite for non-NVMe raid due to the out of band management they offer. They are also more tunable than basically all other hardware raid controllers; they offer granularity of function down to managing the controller's built in fan in it's OOB interface.
Out of band management for raid is one of those things you don't realize you need until things stop working as expected.

 

[TrevorH]

I had a look at the specs of an H700 and it is PCIe 2.0 so quite bandwidth limited. From another post it would appear the OP has an E5-26xx-v2 based system which would be PCIe 3.0 so they'd be better off looking at an H730 which are much more modern and much better cards and also come with up to 2GB cache. They're still Dell so might need the tape solution to allow one to work. A brief look at ebay UK showed me H700s listed for about £12 and H730s for £30 and 2GB versions for just over £40.

 

[kaitlin4599]

@louie1961 i simply want ot use hardware raid for the experience and also because i dont really like software raid and i like that raid cards come with physical cache

 

[kaitlin4599]

@twin_savage is there a specific card you recommend?

 

[kaitlin4599]

@nexox im not sure i have the skills for that and neither of my cards tell me which pins are which so no idea which ones to tape over

 

[twin_savage]

@twin_savage is there a specific card you recommend?

If you're on a budget the ARC-1882 or ARC-1883 series cards are good. The bigger versions of these cards (the ones with more ports) even let you swap in and out ECC DDR3 UDIMMs for the controller's cache.

If budget is larger, the ARC-1886 series are the newest that are aimed at SATA/SAS drives, but they are PCIe 4.0 which would go unrealized on your current system.
I'm getting 14.2GB/s sequential reads and 7.7GB/s on sequential write on a 24 drive parity raid with this card which is leagues better than even md raid, and without the write hole/spacemap corruption that basically all software raid suffers from.

 

[kaitlin4599]

@twin_savage i only need enough ports for 8 3.5 inch sata drives sure my case can house more drives but i dont need more then 8 drives in my case can you link me to the card you own

 

[twin_savage]

I'm running a ARC-1886-16I to get those numbers:

ARC-1886 series | Tri-Mode RAID Adapters | 廣安科技 Areca

The new fourth generation ARC-1886 family offers advanced technology for increased performance and improved enterprise data protection. They were designed with 1.6 GHz dual core ROC processor, DDR4-2666 memory and PCIe 4.0 interface for the most performance-hungry database and IT applications...

www.areca.com.tw

 

[nthu9280]

@nexox im not sure i have the skills for that and neither of my cards tell me which pins are which so no idea which ones to tape over

Check this: Updated: SAS HBA crossflashing or flashing to IT mode, Dell Perc H200 and H310

 

[fjstore]

so i currently have a supermicro x9dri-ln4f+ motherboard inside a fractal define 7XL with 6 8TB SATA HDD's. i was going to use a dell PERC H700 cards but it doesnt seem to like my board and gives me loads of beep errors while i do have a 2.5 inch sata ssd for the windows 11 os i need a raid card with onbaord cache support 512mb or better what options do i have? the reason my dell card doesnt work is an smb bus issue

MegRAID 9361-8i or MegaRAID 9364-8i