Low consumption hardware RAID card

[falagar]

Hello,

It's been months since I posted here. Today my home server runs a A4-4000 APU on a 6-SATA ports mainboard and 1 x 8 Gb memory module. Add to this 3 x 3 Tb Western Digital Red hard drives, and I get a consomption below 40W. I'm fine with this.

But today, I'd like to run virtualization on this server. Something like VMware ESXi would be perfect, but it requires a hardware RAID card.

Do some of you know any kind of hardware raid card, with low consumption, and, ideally, cheap ?

Thanks,

[quest_for_silence]

Give a look here, if it may help: http://www.servethehome.com/lsi-host-bu ... omparison/

[falagar]

Thanks for pointing me to this documentation. But it's only related to recent boards, which are quite expensive.

What about old ones ? Does someone has a clue ?

Thanks,

[washu]

Give a look here, if it may help: http://www.servethehome.com/lsi-host-bu ... omparison/

That list is only HBAs, not RAID cards. Depending on the firmware type installed some LSI HBAs can do basic RAID, but it is BIOS/driver RAID, ie "FakeRAID". Those cards are great HBAs for JBOD or software RAID, but are not suitable for situations that need true hardware RAID like VMware.

My unscientific tests puts an LSI 9260 at +15W from the wall when added to a system. That is a true hardware RAID card. Any true hardware RAID card is going to have a CPU and likely cache RAM which will add to its power draw.

[falagar]

Hi,

And thank you. I was already aware of the differences between fake-raid and real cards. But I can's manage to find, in the tech specs datasheets, the consumption of the cards (I searched for PERC series, P410, some Adaptec controllers)... Seems that no measurement is done ?