RAID 2: A Look At The PCI Players

INTRODUCTION

Back in May we published an guide on RAID entitled: RAID: A Guide For All ... Part 1. We announced at that time that it would be the first in a series of RAID related articles and reviews as this subject seemed to have quite a bit of interest by our readers on the subject. I think this interest by our readers was generated primarily because only a few very highly technical "white papers" and a few equipment related reviews had been published since 2004. These white papers, although quite excellent for the extreme techie, were way over most peoples' heads with regard to content. Our goal with the first and subsequent RAID related guides and reviews is to make the content such that everyone from the beginner to the expert can garner some useful information from the content they contain.

Part 1 of this series dealt predominately with a history of RAID technology from its early beginnings to the present day SATA RAID powerhouses. It detailed all of the various types of technology to choose from when exploring RAID as a viable storage option and was in the form of a guide as opposed to our more common reviews. In planning for part two we thought it would be best to take the next logical step and actually look at some RAID controller cards that were available for the beginner and intermediate level workstations that most of us own today. Yes, by workstation standards most of our power house overclocking monsters would only be considered beginner or intermediate when compared to some of the multi processor behemoths with their $3,000 plus graphic cards that are used for high end graphics, CAD, video editing, and other extremely processor intensive tasks.

In preparation for Part 2 we decided to limit the targeted controllers to those that still function in either a 32 or 64 bit, 33 MHz or 66 MHz PCI slot and support SATA or SATA II drives. We felt that this logical limitation would appeal to the vast majority of our readers as most of them still use this type of equipment, even though we know that the PCI-X and PCI-E based controllers are considerably faster. You may say: "Wait! I've got PCI-E slot(s) in my system!" This may well be true but most of you are not willing to sacrifice your ability to run SLI, Crossfire, or other cards that are more "Consumer Enthusiast" PCI-E based for purposes of having a separate RAID controller in your system. Besides, we'll cover those controllers in Part 3 of this series at a future date once we feel the evolution of motherboards in the Computer Enthusiast realm warrant it.

OK, we had our focus for this presentation but no equipment so it was time to beat the bushes. We wrote the six top RAID controller card manufacturers as well as Seagate, our primary hard drive supplier and explained the circumstances of what we were trying to achieve. We also wrote a few other companies that produce either software or hardware that is an important adjunct to RAID controllers in an effort to obtain some supplementary products to enhance the flavor of this guide. The response was phenomenal as you'll soon see!

So for purposes of clarification, today's presentation will be part guide, part review, part article, and even include a mini shoot-out of the RAID controllers we have for comparison. Now that you're totally confused please join us for what we feel is a very thorough investigation of RAID 2: A Look At The PCI Players.