ASUS Z97 DELUXE with Intel Rapid Storage RAID-5 ?

[Nebol]

Hi!

I'm considering an ASUS Z97 DELUXE motherboard for my new ESXI 5 or 5.5 server. It has Intel Rapid Storage and I want to use RAID-5 with four disks. Would this be possible or is a separate add-in RAID card required?

What about my old (ok, very old) Adaptec 2410SA card/enclosure, is that supported? What would be a better choice?

Although I would really prefer to use the built-in mobo RAID.

Best regards,

J.

[JarryG]

ESXi does not support on-board raid (the only exception being true hw-chips integrated directly on the board, i.e. LSI, Adaptec, Areca, etc). But "Intel Rapid Storage" is sure not supported. Even if you created raid-array, ESXi would see it as separate disks. And even if it worked, you'd get terrible performance because there is no raid-cache. So I recommend you to buy "mature" raid-controller, as add-on card. One with cache, and battery/capacitor...

[Nebol]

Something like LSI MegaRAID SAS 9240-4i SGL or Fujitsu SAS/SATA RAID Ctrl 6Gb/s 0/1 ?

[JarryG]

AFAIK, 9240 does not have cache, so you'd better avoid it because ESXi does not do disk-caching and counts on controller. Raid-controller without cache means terrible performance in ESXi. So get something with on-board cache like LSI-9260, or OEM-models (i.e. IBM M5015/5016). Here is very comprehensive list with parameters, descriptions, etc.:

LSI RAID Controller and HBA Complete Listing Plus OEM Models | ServeTheHome and ServeThe.Biz Forums