Krzysztof - 11 August 2009 07:55 PM
Do you have any suggestions about those controllers, (favourite one??, cheap and good 
)
Sure! 
Though, if you’re not going to run RAID5 or RAID6 the difference between the different controllers becomes less of an issue. It’s the parity calculations for 5 and 6 that are more demanding than RAID10. None for RAID0, of course. The faster the chip on the RAID card is the faster it can do the parity, hence the range (in price and models) that run from 400Mhz processors to 1.2Ghz.
When it comes to pure performance I prefer Areca over anything else. But when it comes to driver support (and other support in general) I prefer Adaptec. The only thing I really dislike about Adaptec is that they don’t put fans on their high-end controllers. They should because those processors on there run *hot* (right now I’m looking at one peaking at 54C degrees! and that’s with an additional slot cooler I managed to stuff in there to keep it from running at 68C). So with Adaptec it’s worth getting a slot cooler in there that can suck some hot hair from near the card. This may also depend on general environmental temperature. Right now it’s a bit hot where I am sitting.
I’ve been moving from Areca to Adaptec mostly because I’ve run into compatibility issues with some disks (it didn’t like certain models of the 1TB Samsung range, kept kicking out disks in the array for no reason). With Adaptec I’ve never ran into those problems so I think Areca is a bit more picky when it comes to the actual models of the disks. Another reason is that driver support is generally better (I use a lot of PE-CD and PE-USB solutions for emergency restore of images and Adaptec drivers are usually support or easy to integrate without spending hours doing slipstreams). And another reason; I can take a set of disks from any Adaptec controller, hook them to any other Adaptec controller and it recognizes the array if all the disks are together, even if they are on different ports. With Areca I once had to do that in an emergency situation and it failed the entire array.
But when it comes to pure speed, Areca always wins, there’s just no contest. On the other hand, when it comes to RAID0, most cards will give you more performance than the bus can handle so the limitation factor is no longer the # of disks/RAID level/etc. but rather the system itself.
One thing to avoid is the Adaptec 2820SA controller if you want to use Velociraptor disks. With four or more of those the card starts acting up, losing disks in the array every hour or two. Drove me crazy for a week.
Krzysztof - 11 August 2009 07:55 PM
How would you compare those ARECA to ADAPTEC:
ARC-1220 vs ADAPTEC ???
ARC-1230 vs ADAPTEC ???
ARC-1231ML vs ADAPTEC ???
Any of those Areca’s is faster than the fastest controller Adaptec has. I wouldn’t want to compare them by model since there’s a lot of other differences like I described that might be more (or less) important depending on the purpose of the RAID controller.
The Adaptec RAID 51xxx series are currently my preferred model. I’m waiting for an 3805 to arrive which I suspect won’t be as fast as the 51xxx ones but should probably do a decent enough job. I’ve got some 1220’s and 1230’s and given the choice I’d prefer the 1230. Not because it has a few more ports but because the cache is an SO-DIMM that you can swap out for a larger one. I swapped mine for a 1GB DIMM and it’s a noticeable performance increase when copying large amounts of data over the network (especially when using gigabit jumbo frames and the SMB2 in Vista, W7, W2008). A friend of mine did the same thing with a 2GB DIMM so it seems there’s enough of a reason to go a little bigger with Areca to get around the smaller cards with the fixed amount of cache.
Oh, btw, the reason you see a lot of LSI for the onboard stuff is because it appears that Adaptec and others have left the onboard market which got gobbled up by LSI. Also, Intel’s RAID controllers that are branded as Intel products are actually LSI (they’re 100% identical except for a sticker on a chip).
