Sata RAID controller in V64?
October 10, 2008 7:23 AM   Subscribe

SATA card for Vista 64?

I've recently gone to the dark side and upgraded to Vista 64 (from xp64...ugh!). My current mother board has the usual bank of SATA ports, and I've been RAIDing pairs of drives (mirrored) from those ports.

The motherboard is wonky - arrays break apart, the LAN ports wake up and die randomly, and identical BIOS settings have different results. I'm replacing it.

I'd like to get a dedicated hardware RAID controller. Mostly, for scratch space - I do a lot of photoshop, and would like to make a striped array for scratch. (the other drives will be boot, and storage that will be synctoy-backed up offsite.) However, I'm having a hell of a time finding cards (mostly looking at Newegg) at a reasonable price that are specifically Vista 64 compatible. Vista has been out for what, 1.5 years, so you'd think they got around to it by now.

My other thing is price. As evidenced by my use of existing SATA drives, it should be obvious that I'm kinda tight right now.

In short, I need a four-port, SATA, hardware raid controller that is *sure* to work in Vista 64, and won't break the bank.
posted by notsnot to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)
 
Best answer: So, I don't have a specific recommendation, but I did want to warn you against the "LSI LSI00132 PCI Express SATA / SAS MegaRAID 8204ELP". It works with Vista 64, but is a complete dog. Worthless. It even flies slowly when used as a frisbee.

I love my "Adaptec 2251800-R 4-lane PCIe SATA / SAS 3405", but it requires a SAS expander and is quite pricey.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 7:50 AM on October 10, 2008


Response by poster: The adaptec does indeed work with V64?

(and what do you mean by "requires a SAS expander"...the sff cable?
posted by notsnot at 8:02 AM on October 10, 2008


As far as I know, the Adaptec does work with Vista 64, but I never tried, so I can't confirm.

According to Adaptec the 3405 requires a SAS expander, which is like a backplane. I've never tried plugging a drive up to it directly, but with the right cable it will probably work.
posted by TheNewWazoo at 5:21 PM on October 16, 2008


Response by poster: On further research, the 3405 can function on SATA drives directly with no backplane...been working perfectly for a month.
posted by notsnot at 4:08 AM on November 10, 2008


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