Stooney Posted February 18, 2009 Share Posted February 18, 2009 I'm in the market for a hardware raid array setup. I prefer using Sata II in this particular case. I've never really setup a raid from scratch, only maintained them, just fyi. I am looking to have 2 drives in the machine. 1 drive will be for the OS and user profiles (windows domain environment) and the other drive will be for file storage. Each drive will be around 500gb-640gb Sata II. I want each of these 2 drives to be mirrored in the raid array by at least 1 drive. My question is what hardware would you guys recommend? The place I'm doing this for isn't necessarily swimming in cash, but can afford to not go with cheap hardware. So any ideas? (By hardware I just mean the raid cards, pci if possible. Or whatever you would just recommend, I'll check it all out). Let me know if I'm going about something wrong here, sorta new to raids Thank You. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcombs_31 Posted February 18, 2009 Share Posted February 18, 2009 Your setup doesn't even work the way you think. If you only plan to have 2 drives they will both share the same data in one way or the other. You can certainly partition them to have an OS/Data structure, but in order for the raid to work it will share the data among the physical drives whether you do a stripe or mirror raid. Any raid card should do, but most modern motherboards will have a built in raid controller. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corbin Posted February 19, 2009 Share Posted February 19, 2009 jcombs, I think he plans on having 4 hard drives. Not sure. But yeah, the RAID support should be built in to the mobo (unless it's low end or old). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stooney Posted February 19, 2009 Author Share Posted February 19, 2009 Yea, I meant 4 drives total, sorry about that. I always thought the built in raid support was worse quality than an actual card, but now that I think of it I think I just made that up and some point out of assumption. Ty both. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jcombs_31 Posted February 19, 2009 Share Posted February 19, 2009 I use onboard raid. My board actually has 2 raid controllers, one intel that I believe is tied into the southbridge and I can't remember the other, I think it is gigabyte I'm currently using a raid5 with 3 sata drives on the Intel controller. A PCI card theoretically should have less performance because it relies on the PCI bus. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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