I am looking to setup a custom media center and backup solution with 4 X 3TB HDD's in Raid 1+0 setup.
So I am shopping for a raid card, and it turns out its really difficult to find one here in India.
Anyway, I am shopping for at ebay.in and these 2 show up. I need some suggestions as to which one to buy(best performance) and which one would work best with a linux OS. The harddrives are WD 30EZRX (SATA III 6 Gb/s)

1. http://www.ebay.in/itm/431103-001-40...-/110948823744

2. http://www.ebay.in/itm/HP-PCI-SATA-4...-/110948845641


Thank you for your input

The two controllers are quite different. The LSI controller is a (4-lane?) PCI Express SAS/SATA hardware RAID controller, while the other is a HP-rebranded Promise FastTrack SATA-1 PCI "fakeRAID" controller. In other words, they are radically different and might not even fit in the same server.

The LSI would probably outperform the HP/Promise controller even with standard SATA drives, since most drives support at least 3 Gbps ("SATA-2"). In addition, CPU and bus utilization would be lower for the LSI, as the HP controller lets the driver do all the work.

I see you removed the third option you had in your original post, a DELL PERC (probably rebranded Adaptec) dual channel PCI-E SAS/SATA hardware RAID controller with 256 Mb cache. That would have been the fastest controller by quite a margin.

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Ser Olmy bring up maybe the most important point. Not all raid cards are real hardware controlled. The software type or fake raid/faux raid are quite useless for most linux users. Almost all the real hardware raid chipset cards are directed toward enterprise level users and do pretty good on linux.

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Thanks. I removed the DELL PERC because the vendor told me that it would not work on a standard PC setup only on a server. That leads me to my next question, I am planning to do this on a home assembled computer, not a server. Will they work? Maybe I should just ship one from US, which one would be recommend with those HDD's.

There's no reason why these controllers whouldn't work on any PC with a compatible PCI/PCI-E slot. That goes for the Dell PERC too, by the way.

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Have you thought to purchase a 4 bay NAS?

With 200-300$ you can find pretty good and reliable solution!

The Dell card http://www.ebay.in/itm/ws/eBayISAPI....m=110948842682
has two external ports, which is a problem. I am looking for 4 ports internal. I guess I will need to get the LSI Logic controller.

Any another suggesions for M/B or NIC?

I have a DLINK Dns-320 and the speeds I get are horrible on raid 1. (10Mpbs write and 12 mbps read)
Tried a lot of things, but the speeds did not change much. Even if I connect the device directly to my computer using cat5e cable, I do not get more than 25Mbps.