Anyone ever used this RAID card?

[jmdixon85]

Ok so I managed to get the server in my sig for £20 it has replaced my old matx fileserver. Thing is, it would not start up with my cheap 2 port VIA SATA RAID card in it. So I am now using my external backup drive to access all my files.

I was searching ebay for a cheap SATA RAID card and I eventually ordered one that seems very feature rich for the money: http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=290397344402&ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT

I would have liked to ask here first before I bought it if anyone had ever used the card or knows anything about it, but it's pretty urgent I get my Fileserver back up and running so I went ahead and bought it anyway.

So has anyone used one of these before? Good/Bad? It is limited to SATA1 but I can live with that as it shouldn't effect speeds over a 1Gb/s network much.

 

[dorkbert]

A coarse search of NetCell indicated that company went belly up some time ago, and as such I would recommend against having anything to do with it (unless you're into driver development yourself.)

 

[jmdixon85]

Well I've been doing some searching and the card is supported in WinXP, Vista and Win7 without the need of drivers so aslong as Win Server 2008 R2 also supports it then I'm happy.

Oh, and I'm back using my mATX fileserver The PSU in the Proliant blew up on me and I'm not paying £150 for a PSU for it! Still the board, CPU & RAM should sell for a bit more than £20

 

[EarthDog]

"Supports A, B, and C"...so long as it supports D, I should be ok???

Not so sure that will be better than most onboard solutions...sataI no ram...bu should give you a lot more flexibility.

 

[jmdixon85]

It does have 64MB SDRAM cache. It will only be used for storage, 3x 500GB RAID 3 array. I'm reading a lot of poeple saying that the card won't support more than 2GB of total space but I will just have to wait till I get some bigger disks and see for myself. The 133MB's PCI bus limit shouldn't be to much of a drawback for purely storage either.

 

[EarthDog]

I missed that in the description. Well, if you wanted R3 and your board doesnt support it, you got what you wanted.

 

[DrSpanky]

based on the layout and the core on that board i think i have a 3 port version of the card

But mine was branded by XFX and called a revo 64 http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1366&page=3
take a look at the picture.

this may help you track down some more info on the card


*edit*
i used to use this in my old AXP computer with a 2x 74gb raptors in raid 0, and i loved the thing, when doing harddrive benchmarks i would get crazy utilization on the cpu because of the on board raid. i went from 20% cpu usage in HDtach to 1% after i moved over to the card.

 

[jmdixon85]

^ XFX did make these RAID cards too. I don't suppose you know if your card can access over 2TB?

 

[DrSpanky]

sorry never had that kinda storage back then, and all my big drives are formated in ext3

 

[jmdixon85]

Oh well, suppose I will find out someday. I think I will just order three 750GB WD green drives for a 1.5TB RAID 3 array. These drives play nice in RAID dont they?

 

[Ben333]

Well... 5 ports, good enough for me to justify $15 bucks. Getting one. (US Seller: http://cgi.ebay.com/New-PNY-5-Port-...BDDSIC&otn=10&ps=63&clkid=7686734011136621269)

 

[jmdixon85]

^let me know how it goes. Just hope it takes more than 2TB

 

[Ben333]

Hmm... that would be a drag if it doesn't. I'll probably just be making a software RAID 5 in windows 2003 though, with the OS on two mirrored 15k 18GB drives on another controller.

 

[jmdixon85]

Mmm, If the cards hardware RAID don't play nice with over 2TB I wonder if software RAID through the card would work? My server has a E6550 CPU so CPU load wouldn't be a issue The Proliant in my sig blew its PSU just need to update ma sig

 

[Ben333]

That proliant is a solid box, I have a couple G3s I beleive. One of them is an ML350. Power hog though, the C2D is probably a smarter choice.

But yeah, my plan: 4x 500 GB in SW RAID 5, and the OS on 2x 40 GB IDE or 2x 18 GB SCSI mirrored. RAID5 has too much overhead for an OS drive, and this way I can keep things separate too.

 

[Mpegger]

The information has already been posted up, but yes, its a hardware XOR card, supports hot-swapping, and can rebuild while online as well. It's limited to only a few Raid modes, which is Raid 0 or 1 via 2 drives (or 4 for the 5 port version), or Raid 3 via 3 drives (or 5), as well as JBOD. Because it's completely hardware based, it doesn't require any drivers and will work in pretty much any OS. The only software available for it was a Windows program which allows monitoring and alerts to be sent via email if something was to go wrong with any of the drives. I'm not sure, as I never tried, but supposedly the software would only run in WinXP/2000/2003. Any other OS (Vista or even any nix*) could not run the software, which was not that great an option as it was the only way (besides rebooting regularly and watching the boot up screen) to know if there was anything wrong with the array. All the other functions such as creating or rebuilding could be done in the card bios at boot-up.

It was basically the poor-mans hardware Raid card that just never took off.

Btw, I dunno if the card itself was limited to only 2TB, but I believe the reason people say it was limited to that amount is because of the OS, not the card itself. This card is a number of years old, and 2TB back then for the average (and even hardcore) user was something one could only dream of. The drives attached to the card will appear as one drive in the OS, or as multiple drives (depending on how you set them up). So one could reach the 2TB OS partition limit easily via 5 drives (4 + 1 parity).

 

[jmdixon85]

I've installed the software on Win7 and it runs. Just waiting on the card coming.

 

[Mpegger]

Maybe run was the wrong word. From what I read, it just couldn't access the card because of the way Vista allows programs to access hardware, which I'm sure Win7 runs in a similar fashion. Hopefully it works though, because in a server type setup, I doubt you would be rebooting the computer daily and monitoring the bootup yourself just to see if the array is ok.

 

[jmdixon85]

Well I hope at works as for some stupid reason netcell removed the ability to rebuild an array from the cards BIOS in the later firmware If it don't work I will have to downgrade the card FW to an early one

 

[Ben333]

Mine arrived today... so far so good!
http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6398745#post6398745