Any recommendations on an add in RAID controller for a workstation under XP. No striping required just mirroring. Promise looks promising. Hot swapping is not necessary.

Promise cards are pretty-much the standard for IDE RAID 0 and 1. If you have a promise Ultra66 (non-RAID IDE card) you may already have all you need. This card used to come with certain retail-boxed hard drives, so it is pretty common. Look here in case you're interested in converting this card to RAID.

Another note, you may not be into Linux but Promise chipsets are well supported. HighPoint based cards will not work as RAID cards in Linux last I checked.

After further reading, looks like the Promise FastTrak 100 TX2 woudl be suitable.

http://www.3ware.com/ do some nice-looking IDE RAID cards.

Wow, I have never seen them before. They look like they need my attention since I see they're cheap ($135 for 2 port). They also have a 4 and 8 port version!

i have a 4-port escalade running under win2k, and an 8-port escalade running on FreeBSD. best investment i have made in hardware in the last couple of years. quick, stable, reliable.

--dan.

escalade [snip] quick, stable, reliable

It's only a shame nobody seems to sell them in the UK. (Blitz, you don't say where you're from).

There was a thread on linux-kernel about how one of those things can saturate wide PCI (220Mbytes/s disc bandwidth). [bill&ted] Quite good! Quite good! [/bill&ted]

Peter

I have a Promise Fastrack 100, Arco Duplidisk and Duplidisk II and a 3ware 6410.

They all work. I don't really have any personal basis to compare performance other than other people's reviews.

The Promise (in my Win2K desktop) wins on price, certainly, but will only allow 1 mirrored pair, I think. Since it is driver-dependent (and I had some trust issues), I used it to mirror data drives, but I keep "C:"/system on a smaller separate drive which I mirror occasionally with Cheap RAID (Ghost to a backup).

The Arco Duplidisks win on OS transparency. No drivers needed. RAID-1 only. If you break the mirror, drives behave as if they aren't even aware that they were in a mirrored pair. Straightforward, but they have had some problems with Via chipsets.

3ware had announced EOL of all their Escalade single controller boards in favor of their big RAID boxes. They have since partially retracted EOL announcement, but 6000 series are no longer available, just the more expensive 7000 series. *But*, you can still find some 6000 series in the channel. I got a 4-port 6410 here and it works great. The best of my bunch, IMO. RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and JBOD capability for $99 with Win and Linux drivers. I'm probably going to arder another while they have them.

(edit: the 6410 is UDMA 66 only. Hypermicro shows the ATA100-capable 7410 at $235.)

Excellent to hear, and perfect timing. I have a 3 channel Mylex ultra wide card in a RAID 5 array. The drives are too small, so I was about to order new SCSI drives. Using this 3Ware card with IDE drives could save a ton of money. Thanks.

It's only a shame nobody seems to sell them in the UK.

FWIW, the 3ware site lists a distributor in the UK. TMC.

Interesting, while the EOL announcement disappeared from the 3ware website, I stumbled across this EOL story in the Register. Maybe TMC is a less enthusiastic distributor lately! (edit: but I see 3ware controllers on their home page...)

I *do* hope 3ware sticks with the product. Even at the 7000-series pricing, I don't see anything that comes close.

FWIW, the 3ware site lists a distributor in the UK. TMC.

Yeah, but they're literally just a distributor. They don't sell to end users AFAICT.

Peter

Out of curiosity, how do these boards report issues to the administrator? I've only ever used software RAIDs or big-ass dedicated hardware RAIDs.

Out of curiosity, how do these boards report issues to the administrator?

It varies. Promise has a supported Windows utility that pops up error windows, but I don't think it supports e-mail. No idea what the (unsupported, I think) Linux software supports.

The Arco units have a buzzer and a serial output that can be wired to an alarm or a contact closure. They have a new set of Win and Linux support programs, but I don't think they include notification - you'd still have to roll your own off that serial connector.

The 3ware controllers come with a nice, browser-configurable daemon "3dm" that includes configurable SMTP error notification. That's one reason I think it's a better deal.

None of these, to my knowledge, support SNMP.

By Administrator do you mean of the RAID or Network? My XP installation is a standalone workstation (peer to peer networking only) - no administator. A couple of days ago my AMD went out and took out the motherboard with it. I rarely make backups and think of PCs as disposable except I do not want to lose data everytime something happens.

Most of my software at work has hardware locks either through a serial port of the parallel port for each particular program so it's just a quick install on them but every program puts its' particular data files in a subdirectory of that program. It makes quick data file back ups difficult.

A standalone RAID seemed like the perfect solution except in case of catastrophic loss like a fire, etc. The big loss then would be the hardware program locks which are insured.

If it works out, I'm also going to do the same thing on the PC that has all my tediously ripped MP3s on it.

I assume under a mirrored RAID with the Promise card, the drivers would report back to a utility that there were problems.

I mean that if half of your mirror fails, how do you know to replace the failed disk?

I believe Promise uses something called FastTrak GUI which is a Windows utility. You can get RAID 0 or 1 with the TX2 but for RAID 0+ 1 you need the TX4. I've heard the striping makes it plenty fast... but my needs are solely for protection. I've ordered a TX2 in and I'll report back.

I really want to mirror all my drives. I have Ghost but it takes effort on my part.

I've got a FastTrak 66 which used to be a Ultra 66. It's okay but there is a longish pause at the beginning when scans the array for some reason. Striping does increase the speed quite a bit. I've got two 40GB IBMs (which haven't died yet...) as a striped array to store DV footage.

The Windows GUI gives you basic information on what is attached to what channel and if it's okay or not. There is an old binary only driver and a newer one in the Linux kernel as well if you want to run it under Linux.

If you want to save money then you could turn on software mirroring in XP... Don't know if this would work for your particular situation though.

- Trevor

How do you turn it on in XP? I would try that for the MP3 machine at home but want hardware at the office.

Aw crud. They've only got it in the W2K server products. Sorry!

- Trevor