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Help with Case + High End Storage Setup...

N

ncage

Golden Member
I'm pretty novice when it comes to high end server storage hardware. Right now i have just a mid tower case that is running hyper-v with 2 guess instances (1 Windows 7 + 1 Windows Home server). With the bad news that microsoft will remove DE from windows home server i'm looking for what to move to. Right now my case is REALLY crampes so i definitely want a new case with hot swappable hard drive encolsures. I'm looking at the following cases from nortec:

http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=131
http://www.ipcdirect.net/servlet/Detail?no=202

The only thing that i can see different about these case is one has Mini SAS connectors. Am i correct? One would have 5 mini sas connectors and the other one would have 20 sata connectors? So i would have to buy a port multiplier like this:
http://usa.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?sku=73?

This converts 4 sata/sas ports to 28 ports of mini-sas? Do i need a high end end storage card or will the SATA ports comming of my main board work? I might run ESXi so do i need to worry about the compatibility of CK12803 multiplier just like you would for a RAID card?

I don't know if this matters but i will tell you right now what i plan on running. I will run vmware ESXi. I will be running FreeNAS as an iSCSI san. Right now i don't play to RAID anything except for the two OS drives you can put in the case that aren't hot swappable. Those will be running Raid-1. Course you never know what could happen in the future.
 
If you want to build a serious storage box that focuses on data security, you may want to have a look at ZFS and whether it is suitable to you.

You linked to an expander, not a port multiplier. Expanders are for SAS, PMs are for SATA. SAS is backwards compatible with SATA, but SATA is not forwards compatible with SAS.

You may want to reconsider VMwave (this is not going to be a dedicated storage box?) and the expander if you do want to run ZFS. If you want the option of ZFS, you would want plenty of RAM (8GB+) and pure HBA for software RAID (ZFS does its own RAID; the best usable implementation to date). A HBA means a normal SAS/SATA controller without RAID functions.

I recommend LSI 1068E HBA, for 100 dollars you get 2 mini-SAS connectors allowing you to connect 4 SATA/300 drives each, for a total of 8 drives per controller, that fits in PCI-express x8 slot. This HBA should work in all OS, some OS require you to disable smartd and/or MSI interrupts, though, but otherwise a perfect controller and quite cheap to use multiple ones; at full bandwidth.
 
I was in your kind of boat. I chose a system based on Nexentastor. I couldn't be happier. It performs far better than WHS. The whole setup is also very cost effective. I would get a Supermicro Server MB, ECC RAM (8GB or more - ZFS is memory hungry) and a UPS. Nexentastor places all the recommended hardware on their site. Install was about 30 minutes in total and about 2 minutes of actual interaction. Very easy.
 
no kidding i got just got a free dual 5540 server with sas expander and lsi raid controller i might need to check it out.

you do realize a full box will pull 300-400 watts down 24x7 right? (alot of that is drives)
 
300-400 watts? For a few seconds after you pressed the power button, i presume? You would need to use 80 green HDDs to get a NAS with ~400W idle power consumption, but the peak power at startup would be much higher; between 15-35W spinup current per disk.
 
Sorry for the delays guys in my reply. Just always so busy. Sorry but i'm not that familiar with high end storage stuff. I mean i know the basics on what a SAN is and everything like that but don't know a lot of the specifics. Really didn't know the difference between a Expander and a port multiplier. Not 100% sure with what i will go with at this point but i need redundancy and i don't want traditional raid for my data drives. I want to be able to mix and match different drive/drive sizes. Like i stated above i will probably Raid-1 my OS partition but that is probably it.

So i know i asked a LOT of questions above but lets just do a couple questions at a time to make it simpler:
1. Could anyone look at the two cases i linked above and verify that the only difference between the cases is one has a traditional SAS/SATA connectors while the other one has mini SAS conectors?

2. Mini-SAS: Next would be mini-sas. Can anyone either explain it really well or have a good link into the explanation. What is it? Is there any compatibility issues? How about cost? I don't want to have to spend $1000 to be able to control 20 drives. I don't know what i plan to run right now but i want to get something that is relatively compatible whether it be ESXI, Linux, FreeBSD, UnRAID, or FreeNAS that i end up running.
 
Two LSI 1068E-chipped controllers could power 16 drives, together with onboard ports that is 22 drives, for just $200 or so; controller should be $100 each. This would allow you to run ZFS some later stage, while using the controllers for windows or Linux or whatever you want to run; they should work on all OS.
 
Here's the manuf. page on those cases: http://www.norcotek.com/category.php?id=1

The only difference I see is the connectors to the HDD backplane. 1 has 20x SATA the other has 5x SFF-8087 mini-SAS connectors. If you go with HBAs that have similar multi-channel connectors then the cabling is much easier and cleaner with the SFF-8087 connectors.

Basically it all comes down to which cable type you need to connect at the backplane end. My recommendation is the SFF-8087s and similar connectors on the HBAs you choose.
 
So sub.mesa, where are you finding pci-x LSI 1068E's at ~$100? The only ones I find are the UIO versions from SuperMicro. Sort of annoying that they felt the need to introduce a different form factor.
 
You need PCI-X? PCI-X is just a pimped version of PCI. If you want something good you would want PCI-express unless you really cannot use that. I do not recommend buying PCI-X controller, because you can't use it on a future system which uses only PCI-express. In 2010/2011 buying PCI or PCI-X stuff may not be the best way to spend your money. It also means you use older chips which have more issues. But Supermicro also has a PCI-X controller based on Marvell chip; it doesn't work flawlessly but it could be an alternative. I don't recommend this, though; go PCI-express instead!

The LSI 1068E can be found in:
SuperMicro USAS-L8i (UIO so remove the bracket or get an ATX bracket; but it's normal PCI-express x8)
Intel SASUC8i (same as supermicro but with normal ATX bracket; more expensive; same chip)
Dell (dunno type) and some other vendors also ship LSI 1068E based controllers, LSI's own controller with this chip is quite expensive, for some reason. That's why the SuperMicro USAS-L8i became so popular. They can power 8 SATA/300 disks at nearly full bandwidth (8x300 = 2,4GB/s; PCIe x8 = 2,0GB/s).
 
Awe hell.. yeah pci-e You'd think they could have stayed away from the similar names. That and I could use more sleep. Only Tuesday and I'm already running on empty.
 
Guys if your looking for a card. This seems to be a great card at a great price:
http://www.scsi4me.com/ibm-serveraid-br10i-8-port-pci-express-sas-raid-controller.html

It has the chip that sub.mesa talked about.

sub.mesa....i want to throw you a bone and give you credit with credit is due. This crap is slowly starting to sink in thanks to you. You have been extremely helpful. I'm sure i'll add more questions to this post as i think of them 🙂. Hopefully you stick around.

For those of you looking for a WHS replacement here is a great article:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/36458/9-alternatives-for-windows-home-servers-drive-extender/

LVM also seems interesting. I don't know how it compares to ZFS but i will find out.

Not sure i'll go with ZFS at this point I just put FreeNAS into a VM and found out that ZFS is very experimental at this point. Maybe with the next version that it is beta (FreeNAS 8) it will be stable. Even if people say its stable i'm not willing to trust my data to either beta software or something thats considered experimental. Yes i could run plain FreeBSD but don't know if i want to do that.

There is also an experimental version of ZFS on linux called Btrfs. Unfortuantely the liscences between linux & FreeBSD are not compatible so they had to come up with their own version.
 
LVM is far from ZFS, it's just a tiny subset of features that can be added into whatever features your filesystem of choice has.

LVM provides for concatenation or striping across disks, partition resizing (filesystem must support this too, multi-step operation), snap shots, and data migration. I may have missed a few features.

btrfs is not a version of ZFS it's a new design and implementation of a filesystem that happens to be feature competitive with ZFS and hopes to surpass it. Wonder how long it'll take to get there 😉
 
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