SATA Raid Card

[Althornin]

Hey, I'm looking at purchasing a SATA raid card for use in one of my boxes to provide fast data access and reliablity (most likely go for raid 5).

I've been reading tons of reviews, but i dont seem to see a whole lot of SOLID information.

Any reccommendations?

Cards I've been looking at:

Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 - seems to be pretty much what i want. only complaints i hear are the high CPU usage, which wont be a problem for the AthlonXP 1700+ that will be hosting it. Its cheap, even with the 256MB dimm i'll have to buy.

Adaptec Serial ATA RAID 2410SA - seems pretty nice also. Cost is much higher, but less CPU utilization due to onboard processor. 64MB of cache.

3ware Escalade 8506-4LP - seems nice, pretty comparable to the Adaptec card, but cost is high still. 64MB of cache.

Right now, i am leaning towards the Promise card, because CPU utilization wont be a huge worry for me - just a few less cycles spent folding )) - the host isnt a workstation or anything. So, have any advice?
A nice card i havnet heard about? OR something that tells me i am wrong (or right)? I'm about to drop a load of cash on drives and a card, i dont want to make the wrong choice.
Thanks.

Ah yes:
Drives - I am looking at getting 3 Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM SATA WD1600JD drives. any insight?

 

[epicstruggle]

raidcore scored good from toms review, but i think it _might_ be offered in pci-x format only.
epic

 

[davefb]

i can offer the following insight

i have the wd160, and i've had a nightmare trying to get all 160 to work . i *think* it's coz i did a fresh winxp ( oem with sp1 alreadyon , allegedly) . i *think* it hadnt set the 48bit addressing up correctly so my drive hasnt properly been formatted .

So i'd recommend you try to find out as much about 48bit adressing as possible before installing !

good luck
-dave-
anybody know a good partition resizing program thats free and works with ntfs ?

 

[Dio]

Yeah, 48-bit is to be approached with some trepidation. I upgraded my fileserver and bunged a WD 160G drive in it.

The BIOS doesn't support 48-bit, but that wasn't an issue.

I think the critical difference was that being a server, I put all the data on the big server drive and the OS on a small second drive - so I could install the OS and SP4 before needing to tinker with the 48-bit settings.

At that point I could insert the new drive and turn on 48-bit LBA in the registry. I partitioned the new drive into 120Gish and 40Gish partitions, copied on a load of data, then tested it by filling the 40G partition full to make sure it didn't corrupt anything ont he 120G. No problems, so I've concluded it's working fine.

If you're installing onto a single drive which needs 48-bit, I would suggest it's probably important to have a 48-bit compatible BIOS.

 

[Althornin]

I've had plenty of experience with big drives and 48bit addressing, thats not really my concern here
I am aware of the potential problems, but, as Dio has, my fileserver has its own hard drive (for OS), and the mobo properly supports 48bit lba anyways - not that it matters, as the raid controller certainly supports it.