RAID 5 Experience - CAN U HELP?

I'm looking at installing a Promise S150 TX4 controller configured to provide RAID 5 with four hot swapable physical drives.

The S150 TX4 is a four channel SATA RAID controller.

Does anyone have any experience with this type of subsystem? Any war stories greatly appreciated. I tried an Adaptec sub system with their 1210 controller configured to RAID 1 with two physical drives and the results were very disappointing.

 

Plenty of experience with RAID subsystems but none with Serial ATA

Manufacturers are still reccomending SCSI RAID for real fault tolernace workhorses as the SATA disks are just not built for 24 X 7 X 365 working

What role do you have in mind for the Promise card and its disks ?

 

Andy, thanks for coming in on this. Looking at building a light server which will have 40 hour week use, rather than a 24x7x365 bulldozer. Looking for disk redundancy. Have tried some 120 GB Seagate 8 MB SATA drives and by ATA standards they are very good, quiet, so far trouble free. I was fairly cynical to start with, thinking SATA was just ATA wrapped up in a different label, but I'm happy after three months continuous use and would like to go to the next stage with the drives which is to build a RAID 5 configuration and Promise looked a good way to go, hence my questions.

 

I have already have done a couple of servers with SATA RAID and they have been working flawless for almost a year.

However, I don't think the TX4 is the correct card. It does not do RAID 5.

You need the SX4 card. http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?productId=112&familyId=2


Have you selected a case yet? Super Micro makes a nice peice with 4 SATA hot swap bays built in. http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductDesc.asp?description=11-152-904&depa=0

 

ssmith10pn

Thanks for this. Partically your advice on the Promise controller name. I followed yr advice and was able to get a case locally. How do you find the Abit IC7-Max3? And the Silicon Image RAID Controller?

 

I don't like it. I had several problems with it loosing the arraw on warm boot. I pulled the board and installed a P4P800-E Deluxe (Asus)