Tips For Buying a RAID Controller Card
Interfaces, technology, and new RAID levels make selecting a RAID controller more than merely a choice between performance and price. Therefore, we’ve come up with a few tips that provide valuable insights that will help you ensure that you get the right RAID controller Card to suit your specific needs.
· Forward or backward compatibility interface
Currently, choosing a RAID controller means making a choice between a PCI-X interface and PCIe bus interface, and it is essential that you want one that will suit your requirements. Both interfaces have advantages that will make them the best choice for anyone. Starting with the PCI-X interface, it has backward compatibility with old versions of the PCI interface.
However, the bus runs as fast as the slowest device because this type of interface is parallel and half-duplex bidirectional. Whereas, PCIe is the latest forward-looking that is intended to cope with scalability and performance demands. Furthermore, it is serial and full-duplex bidirectional, and devices can negotiate the bus speed independently.
· RAID levels and migration
It is highly complex to choose which RAID level you need with the new RAID levels introduced in the market. It is vital to ensure that you have the correct level of suiting your needs, and you can take experts’ opinions about which level you will get with the controller card like the SCSI RAID controller card. Begin with considering the factors mentioned below to choose the RAID level that is apt for you. Every element becomes a trade-off for another one:
- Data availability or data protection required.
- Cost of disk storage.
- Performance needs.
After considering these points, the next thing that comes to mind is the level migration, which is required when data is protected, but your requirements change. Therefore, in that case, you will be required to migrate your data to your new controller card.
· Data Capacity
Do you estimate the amount of data you need when you retire your old storage or base your data requirement on your current needs when calculating the size of your new server? The best way to solve this is by buying your future demand now and expanding the storage as much as possible.
You can add larger disks to your server, but different RAID controllers will deal with the storage capacity in different ways. Therefore, you must be aware of how your potential storage solution will deal with this further.
· Limitation of SATA
Even if you want to use SATA disks, there is a simpler infrastructure than SATA- if you are looking at expanding the capacity of your server with JBODs. SATA does have drawbacks, no matter they allow port multipliers. You can’t daisy-chain them, which limits their flexibility and expandability, and moreover, they only support one host connection at a time.
However, these drives can be used in SCSI infrastructures that allow up to 128 drives, and with one SCSI RAID controller card, you can significantly drop the cost per drive.
· Operating System
The original reasons for choosing one OS over another may not be the same in a year’s time as the operating systems are constantly being upgraded. Besides, you may have different operating systems on different PCs today.
Your choice of RAID controller card shouldn’t bind either your choice of OS or the speed at which you can get an OS upgrade.
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Pravesh Patel is a SEO specialist with 5 years of experience.