A good sata/ide raid card?

[diz_guy]

Hi, I bought a VIA 6421 chipset raid card, apparently it has been sucking for me. I tried booting up my computer today and yesterday, it doesn't detect the card.
Would it be my motherboard or the card? I'm planning on getting a new motherboard anyways WITH sata/ide and raid included.

Also, if I get the new motherboard and put the hard drives in, would I have to format because it doesn't detect the raid? For ex, if I got a new raid card would I have to format the drives because I'd have to make a new array?

Thanks.

(PS im looking for a dfi lanparty nf2 board if anyone has one for sale)

 

[Nodsu]

Pretty much all integrated SATA controllers suck unless you buy a high end workstation motherboard In my experience, Silicon Image is the worst SATA "RAID" chip maker.

Yes, as a rule, fakeraid controllers have model-specific configuration information and they don't work with arrays created by some other controller.

 

[DelJo63]

IF you really need a raid solution AND you're looking to purchase a new card to
support it, then go for the best solution -- SCSI raid cards.

If you think the controller and a pair of scsi HDs are too expensive, then
(imo) you really do not need a raid solution.

ALL webservers (ok, I haven't surveyed every one of them ) that use raid
will opt for hot-swappable scsi implementations.

 

[diz_guy]

okay, so let me sum this up.. you guys are saying raid integregated into mobos are not as good as those pci/scsi raid cards right?

 

[DelJo63]

BINGO! absolutely correct.

 

[Nodsu]

Mind you, SCSI hard drives are for server use and are very, very, very noisy (but fast and reliable).

This is a really good page: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Hardware/sata.html

The controllers labelled "real hardware RAID" are good. The ones named "fakeraid" are bad.

 

[DelJo63]

Mind you, SCSI hard drives are for server use

Today this may be true, but until just a few years ago, all Macintoshs came
only with scsi drives.

and are very, very, very noisy (but fast and reliable).

says who? I've had several and not had any such 'noise'. The cooling fan from
the system was all that was ever heard

 

[Nodsu]

And whan was that? 10 years ago?
Today, there are no SCSI drives below 10000RPM and those things sound like jet engines

 

[DelJo63]

Today Macs are shipping only with IDEs, but that doesn't mean scsi is dead.
You can still get scsi cards/drives for all PowerPC Macs -- it's only the Intel systems
that dropped the support.