I'm mainly looking for a card. I'm looking for something $50 and under. I was thinking about a Perc 6I. I'm wanting to get 4 1tb drives and maybe 4 more drives of some sort later on. I think my case supports 10 3.5" drives.

I think I've seen cheap Chinese no brand cards on ebay, that looked nice. Or maybe something from newegg?

I currently use Debian as a server OS, but might go to fedora and get the linux bible... one of these days. (After I get though 3 other books I have)

Thanks,
Higgins909

I'd avoid the cheap cards like the plague. RAID isn't something to go cheap on, but since you have internal drive space, you should be able to get away with under $200 for a decent RAID controller card. Something like:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...-129-_-Product

...may work nicely for what you're after. That's SAS, but you didn't say what kind of drives you were getting. Personally, I have one of these:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...5067-_-Product

...and like it. Cheap, and uses very cheap 3.5" drives, no tools required, and is standard USB3.0 or ESATA. I did a software-RAID on it, and get decent performance/capacity, with the benefit of it being portable.

I plan just to get cheap $40-50 sata drives. $200 is alot of $$ for me to be spending on just a raid card. You didn't like the idea of getting a used Perc 6I? They're roughly $30 on ebay used. I did spot a supermicro card that was JBOD only and about $111. I don't know what JBOD really is, but is it like having a bunch of single drives or does JBOD combine them all the physical drives into 1 drive? Wondering if I could just run software raid on it. I've never done anything with raid and don't really know much about it at all...

I was going to suggest that, but decided to stay out of the way until somebody could offer a sane hardware response. Have a read of this wiki for background. It means you aren't tied to finding another (similar ?) card if yours dies. May not be a real issue, but I prefer to just treat the disks as a commodity.

And my normal closing line - RAID is not a substitute for backups.

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I think you only have two ways to go. One is to get a real enterprise level hardware raid with solid drives(edit, didn't really mean SSD here) and make a real hardware raid array orrr. Just use some software level of raid on collection of generic disks. LVM, ZFS, Btrfs all have uses.

Fake raid cards are just trouble.

1 members found this post helpful.

As far as I know, unless you have a real RAID card with its own processor, you're better off configuring the drives as individual disks going with software RAID. You should be able to set it up using most distro's installer program, or manually using the 'mdadm' command.

https://serverfault.com/questions/52...a-k-a-fakeraid

https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1484516

Bold added for emphasis. Couldn't agree more; there is a reason some "RAID" cards are $30 and some are $300. In my experience, you DO NOT skimp on RAID hardware, ever, if you want things to work reliably, and get the benefits of RAID. Hot-swappable spares have saved me countless sleepless nights.

I concur with the others here... Mostly.

If you intend to go with a parity based RAID, then cheap hardware is a mistake. For one, you'll lose performance over all. Parity based RAID requires a huge amount of mathematical operations to write. (Also to read, but only when a running with a failed drive.) Without the dedicated processor on the HBA, all that has to be done by the CPU.

However, if you just want performance with redundancy and don't mind losing a little disk space to do it, RAID 10 from either the integrated controller or a non-accelerated HBA is fine. It's usually faster than RAID 5 anyway, just costs a 50% of your total disk space.

That said, I think you're better off using your motherboard's controller/HBA for a RAID 10 setup as opposed to buying a $50 card. You're not likely to find anything electronically reliable for under $90, and that won't come anywhere close to having hardware acceleration. If you absolutely cannot afford that, look for a solid-brand used one from a computer recycling outlet, or on ebay. It will probably have set in a server for a few years, but I still trust that more than Chinese electronic trash.

I would rather use inexpensive but good quality controller cards that do NOT do native raid and do rain in software than to get a cheap raid card. I agree with everyone above who submits that cheap raid hardware is nothing but trouble.

I managed a development system recently that used 30 SCSI drives (rotational) in two storage drawers off of two FW SCSI controllers for adequate and sufficiently fast storage. It was provisioned before SSD drives were available. The ( honkin' expensive) cards had RAID capability built in, but software raid level 6 was actually faster than the controller raid level 5!
Today I would use SSD and larger drives with no more than 8 drives per controller (no more than six currently active per controller). SSD maxes out the card throughput at about 6 active drives IF your card is pretty fast. Rotational drives can go 15 to a fast card and still leave some channel overhead. Spreading out the I/O on multiple drives can return nice performance advantages. (Select your bottlenecks with care.)

If your budget is constrained, mirroring two SSD drives can be done formatting EXT4 on MDADM or LVM, or using BTRFS pretty easily and with excellent performance. While the same can be said of rotational drives, the best performance in my testing (for SMALL systems) was with raid level 5 using software raid and lots of memory. (The availability of extra memory for I/O buffers seems key.)

I hope that this helps.

I remember purchasing a UWSCSI card back in the 1990's for my personal workstation. It was an Adaptec with full acceleration and cost me $229 back then. All I had on it was an scsi cdrom and one 10k hdd. It made my system much faster just by way of taking the ATA load off the CPU. It was the first time I was able to burn cdroms without having 1 in 3 underrun the buffer. In fact, I could happily run Netscape and browse the web without fear of messing up the burn.

"I could happily run Netscape and browse the web without fear"

You can't anymore.

And not necessarily because of insecurity (although that's a large part). A couple years ago, Mosaic (remember THAT?) released a source code dump of their last browser, and you could compile/run it. Not even Google would load correctly, and the results were entertaining. Unless it was VERY basic HTML...not much worked.

LOL! Obviously you guys don't know what's running under Seamonkey.

I took a liberty in making the joke to a time when the quote was directed. When I used Netscape I meant using it a million years ago. Took a few hours to download. To a time when I had to disable images to get any web page to load.

I tried to post the smiley face.