Does it come with a RAID controller card or do I have to buy that separately?
1295140
RAID is built into the device. The T5C takes care of the RAID processing. You can attach it to your PC via USB or SATA. I suggest you call "American Medai System", the manufacturer at 510.353.0211 and speak with their tech support to get answers to your questions. If you plan to access the drives individually on your PC using a SATA connection, be sure your PC has "Port Multiplier" capability. If your PC doesn't have that capability then you will have to buy a SATA controller card with that capability. You can use a USB connection and access them individually with no special capability required otherwise. SATA is much faster than USB. The "port multiplier" capability I mentioned is for your motherboard's SATA controller and has nothing to do with RAID. RAID is handled completely in the Venus T5C enclosure device!
1295141
Plugs right into your SATA port or USB. Controller is contained in the unit.
1295142
The raid controller is embedded into the enclosure. Just connect the cabinet to the pc or Mac via usb 2 or 3, or esata. Configuration of the raid set is via a set of dip switches on the back of the unit.
1944265
With a raid card you wont have to rely on getting the same motherboard chipset that the raid was created on which can be difficult a few years after purchase. You can just pop this in a new motherboard and it would just work without worries of having to reconfigure onboard raid and risk corrupting or overwriting the data already on the drives, which is way to easy to do.
1233657
No, a Raid-Controller do allways format the drives you put in.If you want to use these drives in Raid without losing the data, you need to backup the data to another drive and copy it back when their set up as Raid.
897991
Can't speak specifically to Windows. But Silicon Image 3132 chipset cards allow me to pull SMART data from the drives in FreeBSD. Plus most Silicon Image cards have a RAID and non-RAID firmware. I flashed mine to non-RAID and use ZFS Raid-Z.
154921
Jeffrey: 1st .. SAS drives do not come with USB cables. You do NOT use a USB interface with them. Your need a Raid or HBA controller. Many motherboards have on-board SATA raid controllers which are not designed for SAS drives. There are some "enterprise class" mobos with SAS controllers but they are very pricey. Most discreet Raid / HBA controllers (LSI / Adaptec are the best) use an 8087 internal host connector which branches out to (4) connectors on the hdd end. The hdd end connectors are dependent on whether your drives are internal / external. More info at: http://www.elpeus.com/categories/sas-mini-sas/external-sas-cables.html The biggest differences between SATA & SAS is that all SAS drives are enterprise class and designed for Raid whereas most SATA drives are not designed for Raid. SAS can read / write simultaneously and SATA can only do one or the other. For most SOHO applications the motherboard SATA raid will suffice. WD makes some very good enterprise class SATA NAS hdds. You will find better performance from SAS but the Raid controller / cables are not cheap. I hope this helped. Good Luck & have fun:) Oh, by the way, I'm still running my Seagate SAS drives with no problems. I'm a happy camper.
1160255
This card doesn't actually do RAID (it's all done in software) so there is not really any restriction in how you can use it. For instance I used mine with 4 drives connected to this card and another to the on-board controller, for a total of 5 drives in the array.
1279174
No, it uses a special kind of msata which has built in raid controller and also bios is locked to raid mode.
1853219
I do not know the direct answer to your question.If RAID is of no importance to you, why not simply buy an external drive for supplemental storage or for backup?I use RAID for its data redundancy.If that is of no importance, why bother with a RAID enabled device?Cheaper and high quality alternatives exist.
326288
No idea but Google around. I see lots of comments about SSD and RAID setups on the net. Good luck!
1129012
Mine came with the extension card. They can be RAIDed. However, I have not been able to boot from a RAIDed unit.
2215019
Thank you. The board is an ASUS Sabertooth Z87 with a RAID controller onboard. I want to use both a RAID data array and SSD drives for OS. I am told the board can do this but I'm unsure about setup of this feature and thought the card may be an easier way to control the array and set the BIOS for hot swap SATA and let the card control the array. Maybe I should look at a different RAID card.
1621432
It does not come with any drives. You have to buy your own.I put in four 3gig drives. I set it up as raid-5, and it has about 8.2 TB.
1877963
yes. And it requires setting a jumper in the enclosure to which raid type you want.
160298
This is not a completely hardware RAID. It is called hardware assisted. That means it has logic on the board to calculate the RAID 5 "hashes". You still need a special driver on the host machine to do a lot of the work. I do that on an Ubuntu Linux server, but it's a pain. Every time a new kernel comes out that has new kernel headers, I have to recompile the driver source code. With disk space as cheap as it is these days, I gave up on RAID 5 and just mirror (RAID 2) each drive, so that if I have a failure of the interface card or the SansDigital drive enclosure, I can just pull out a drive and use it instead. I wouldn't even consider using a specialized RAID interface unless I had on-site spares of all parts or a disaster recovery plan. Too big a risk of losing everything because you can't get parts. There are disk enclosures ($$$) that do mirroring in hardware, but use a standard EIDE or USB interface so no special host interface is needed. Good Luck
2109237
The beauty of a box like this is that the RAID function is externally contained, your cpu doesn't even have to know you have RAID. However, connection through router is usually funky, the thruput of your router's USB port will be slow and it typically wants you to load a driver for each client (painful) to function.
2250249
It does not but it's default bios can raid for raid1 other than that u will red to get your own or a software raid.
2041004
Right now I have a mirrored array on this PCI RAID SATA card with two 2 TB SATA hard drives. I am booting my Windows 7 Pro machine on a separate SATA controller on my motherboard from an SSD drive.