thanks
just registered to the forums to thank you for sharing your experience
found the thread looking for the same idea: safe storage+low power+low cost
the rocketraid 2720sgl has still no rivals in terms of price/performance
i decided to go with 8x hitachi travelstars because they have an 3y warranty
and are a bit cheaper too, sata3 as bonus
the disks are installed in a supermicro CSE-M28SAB enclosure:
http://www.supermicro.com/a_images/products/Accessories/CSE-M28SAB-OEM.jpg
unbeatable small form factor, but pricey and not really compatible to to highpoint's enclosure management (overheat/fan fail led does not work despite supermicro sas cables with sideband used)
it was a pain to get the controller to work on my msi k9nd board but the advantage of
a fake raid controller is: you dont need controller's bios to configure it (option rom issue)
flashed the firmware via pcie hot plug (booted to dos without controller, plugged it in live and flashed firmware 1.5)
works like a charm
configuration via web tool: 8x 1tb in raid6, 4k sectors and 64kb stripes, write back and disk cache on
windows auto aligned the volume at 128mb or something, seems ok
performance was really good with an empty array: nearly 600mb/s read and 500mb/s write
not bad for a 'hardware assisted' raid and cheap laptop drives
but here are some real world scores with array 50% filled:
http://img835.imageshack.us/img835/4651/attow2k8r2arrayfilled.jpg
also noticed write performance decreased a bit after switching from w2k3x64 to w2k8r2, despite win7 / server 2008 driver is newer
and the array gets slower with more data on it - like expected
seems the (cpu dependend) performance is suffering from processor's power saving features
write speeds go down if i use the balanced power profile in windows
when i bought the drives (4 each from different distros) i expected at least one drive with quality issues...
but no all 8 disks run without any smart event since 3 months
maybe the hitachis were a good choice
i'm sorry for necroing this thread but i hope some more people with low power/low cost arrays will report here...
i'm also curious about your experience with the wd disks
greets from germany