Hardware RAID question

[jackalope1]

I'm looking at getting the LSI 9260-4i RAID card. Can I make a RAID 1 with two mechanical drives and hook up an SSD as a single drive through the RAID card?

Or, would I be better off connecting the single SSD to my onboard 6Gb SATA port? Thanks.

 

[boochi]

Why would you want an expensive LSI card to run RAID1 unless you are getting the battery backup option? Those cards shine when running RAID0 or RAID5. If you have RAID support on your motherboard, it will perform almost as well at RAID1.

 

[jackalope1]

I plan on getting more drives when the prices come down to do a RAID 5. I have a need for redundancy now and I don't fully trust onboard RAID :\

The main question I have is if I would be overloading the card if I ran my OS on the SSD and RAID 1 all through the card. I wouldn't think so, but I've never had hardware RAID before.

 

[slow_poke]

You would certainly be no where near over loading the card. They actually tend to perform better when maxed out with drives.

 

[Emulex]

you use cachecade 2.0 to accelerate the raid 1 of mechanical - just be sure to get a fast ssd like 6gbps and not larger than 512gb