I'm going to be building a RAID5 or 6 system in the new year (I'm still unsure about which I'll get) and it'll be based round an Atom CPU/motherboard combo running headless. I'm wondering if anyones got reccomendations on a good host card?
that depends on your budget and how big you want the array to get... Do Atom boards have PCIe lanes? The best raid cards are always from Areca.
Most of them have PCI slots (one of) but there's mumblings of PCIe versions coming soon. So i'd like a choice really.
I'd recommend something Intel IOP based for a serious RAID card, however it all comes down to budget, how many drives you will be using and how much throughput you'll need (or how much throughput your network can manage)
running 4 1TB drives in Raid 5 will give you less then 3 TB of usable space, so i think you'll want to go with 1,5 TB drives then. That will give you about 4 TB usable space, and you can use 4-port cards. Sometimes 8-port cards are almost twice the price, so look out at what you are getting!
Personally I have a highpoint Rocket Raid 2310 which whilst not exactly "high end" in terms of anything like the decent Areca cards, does the job well and wasn't too expensive. It has four SATA sockets, uses PCIe x4 and says it can support more than 2TB of hard disk space.
Hmmm...this sounds familar. I looked at the Dual Core Atom board for my small RAID server buildup. I ended up going with software RAID and an AMD mini-ITX solution. Not trying to talk you out of hardware RAID at all, but what are your goals for the system? For what its worth I am using (4) 1TB Samsung EcoGreen drives in a RAID-5 under Linux. I have 2.7TB of usable space after formatting with EXT3. I yield about 25 MB/sec transfer over gigabyte network, without trying to optimize the connection.
