12-drive storage server: RAID card, interface card, or motherboard?

[CZroe]

I recently dug up my old Cooler Master Stacker STC-T01 that I had decked out with two extra 4-in-3 modules for a 12-drive array inside (13 including the boot drive in its own 5.25" bay). It originally housed two PSUs with two 6-channel IDE Promise SuperTrak SX6000 cards with 256MB (128x2) SDRAM cache on top of the cache the Hitachi 7k400 HDDs had.

I modded it for reverse ATX just for the heck of it (easy because this was made to be converted to BTX) and now I'm ready to rebuild it into a modern file server. I can't possibly afford 12x4TB right now but I already have enough 4TB HGST CoolSpin drives to fill one 4-in-3 module (16TB!). I've got a few more 2TB drives around and I'm sure I can fill the remaining slots with 1TB drives. Other than the PSU (PC Power and Cooling Turbo-Cool 1KW) and chassis, it's going to be a whole new system (mobo, CPU, etc) but I haven't decided on anything yet. For one, I don't know if I want a low-power system for always-on operation (possibly with an AMD Zacate board my brother has) or if I should repurpose my older Core 2 Quad Q6600 for dual-duty (games and file-serving) or build something completely different with a specialty board (something with 14 SATA ports?).

It seems that only super-premium boards have 14 SATA ports, so either an SATA controller card or a RAID card is likely. Suggestions? I don't think I should waste four of 16 TB on RAID5 so that'll probably have to wait until I get a couple more 4TB drives, if it even makes sense with all the other random drives I'll have (mostly JBOD 1TB and 2TB).

 

[Cerb]

Depends on OS, and what you want to do (which you haven't decided on, yet). With Windows, you very well may want a RAID card. With Linux or FreeBSD (such as FreeNAS or NAS4free), just get an HBA for extra ports, which could run anywhere from $50-150 for a basic 8-port used/pull. Some folks bite on a good RAID deal, and set up 1-drive RAID 0s on RAID cards, instead of using HBAs, too, but not every program will read HDD SMART values, if you do that (I know some will, but I forgot which, for Windows, and Google isn't helping ). With ZFS on Linux now considered stable, and going into server distros, your options without hardware RAID are good, for use as a file server.

While not exhaustive, at this point, this would be a good start:
http://forums.servethehome.com/f19/lsi-raid-controller-hba-complete-listing-plus-oem-models-599.html

The LSI 8000 line are fine for HDDs, 9200 excel with SSDs (faster than Intel ports, for RAID use), they're affordable, they're reliable, and they work well in every Vista+ Windows, modern Linux, or modern FreeBSD. Most of those motherboards with 4-8 added ports are using one of those common LSI chips, as an integrated ZCR implementation.

As long as what you get in there has its own video, and at least 1 physical 8x or 16x slot, you can easily add 8 ports (for 14, typically), plus another 8 for every physical 8x+ slot. So, with a completely new build, a Micro with 2 or 3 16x slots would give you the ability to make a RAID tentacle monster, replacing those 3x5.25->4x3.5 bays with several 1x5.25->4x2.5 ones :twisted:. You might not want to do that, but with long physical PCI-es, you can have options.