Very long story short of an evolution toward figuring out wth I need/want to build for a little network attached backup system, I settled on building one.
The goal is to connect my main system with about 10 to 12TB of storage, to a secondary system that I want to mirror all of my data onto.
I want them to be separate in case anything such as a failed driver, etc doesn't take out the whole shebang, which was why I decided not to just use a big external enclosure and rather a full secondary system.
At first I was a bit worried about using an older Adaptec Sata II card in the backup machine to connect all the drives, but figured since I'll just be using standard Sata drives likely in a JBOD configuration nothing fancy, it will probably be good enough anyway, but then it dawned on me that wasn't going to be my biggest bottleneck... Actually connecting the two systems together was!
I should mention that whatever my best solution to connect these two systems is, I am limited to only a free pci-e x1 slot on each board for an interconnect aside from just the built in gigabit ethernet ports on each board, which I'd like transfers between them to be faster.
I first stumbled upon infiniband stuff which looked really awesome and doable, but then I realized I had the x1 pci-e slot on each board limitation to work with and most of those are x4 or x8 card. So I looked at 10GB, same, usually x4, couldn't find a single x1 10GB card, doesn't exist I guess and that makes sense since pci-e x1 can't push that much anyway, but it CAN push two regular gigabit connections.
So that is where I'm at, I am trying to find two dual port gigabit x1 pci-e cards that support Windows 7 (preferably later versions of Windows as well for the future) and I can combine ports (I think that is called "teaming"?) to make the two ports on each card essentially act as one and combine.
Finding this hardware seems to be just as tough as figuring out what cards would actually support doing this, AND, it almost seems like the ONLY dual gigabit port x1 cards I can find are chinese intel proset knockoffs? I was about to grab two of them and pray but I don't want to waste what money I have for this project either as I still need to pick up at least 3 more 4TB drives, a giant arse RAID card, plus these two cards at the least.
Then, assuming I had the cards in the future here after figuring out wtf purely hardware wise, I have no idea how to actually connect the two cards/pcs directly with them and combine ports. (I figured I would just connect both ports of each card on both systems together and set them to be a diff subnet from the built in gigabit ports on each board, and not set a gateway on them but I think that's as much as I know, and I don't know what cables to use either.)
Sorry for the long post, but it's a lot of specifics and detail for this one.
The goal is to connect my main system with about 10 to 12TB of storage, to a secondary system that I want to mirror all of my data onto.
I want them to be separate in case anything such as a failed driver, etc doesn't take out the whole shebang, which was why I decided not to just use a big external enclosure and rather a full secondary system.
At first I was a bit worried about using an older Adaptec Sata II card in the backup machine to connect all the drives, but figured since I'll just be using standard Sata drives likely in a JBOD configuration nothing fancy, it will probably be good enough anyway, but then it dawned on me that wasn't going to be my biggest bottleneck... Actually connecting the two systems together was!
I should mention that whatever my best solution to connect these two systems is, I am limited to only a free pci-e x1 slot on each board for an interconnect aside from just the built in gigabit ethernet ports on each board, which I'd like transfers between them to be faster.
I first stumbled upon infiniband stuff which looked really awesome and doable, but then I realized I had the x1 pci-e slot on each board limitation to work with and most of those are x4 or x8 card. So I looked at 10GB, same, usually x4, couldn't find a single x1 10GB card, doesn't exist I guess and that makes sense since pci-e x1 can't push that much anyway, but it CAN push two regular gigabit connections.
So that is where I'm at, I am trying to find two dual port gigabit x1 pci-e cards that support Windows 7 (preferably later versions of Windows as well for the future) and I can combine ports (I think that is called "teaming"?) to make the two ports on each card essentially act as one and combine.
Finding this hardware seems to be just as tough as figuring out what cards would actually support doing this, AND, it almost seems like the ONLY dual gigabit port x1 cards I can find are chinese intel proset knockoffs? I was about to grab two of them and pray but I don't want to waste what money I have for this project either as I still need to pick up at least 3 more 4TB drives, a giant arse RAID card, plus these two cards at the least.
Then, assuming I had the cards in the future here after figuring out wtf purely hardware wise, I have no idea how to actually connect the two cards/pcs directly with them and combine ports. (I figured I would just connect both ports of each card on both systems together and set them to be a diff subnet from the built in gigabit ports on each board, and not set a gateway on them but I think that's as much as I know, and I don't know what cables to use either.)
Sorry for the long post, but it's a lot of specifics and detail for this one.
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