Need assistance choosing a RAID controller

[holty]

Hi,

I'm building a home storage server, that will also be a webserver, stream some media, and perform network backups. The server might also be a hyperv server if i decide to use windows 2008 r2. still deciding what OS i want to run because technically Win7 can do everything i need, except the hyperV stuff. Anyways...I need to know which controller card to use for my RAID needs. Here is what i'm looking to do:

-OS drives in a RAID 1
2x Western digital velociraptors

-Data/storage drives in a RAID 5?
6x 1TB enterprise grade drives; have not decided which ones yet, probably WD RE3's

Will be going with SATA drives as I don't know much about SAS drives i want to stick with what i know and can easily substitute a non-enterprise grade drive if needed in a bind at some point.

KEY NOTE: I will be using a Supermicro CSE-743TQ-865B case
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4u/743/SC743TQ-865.cfm

I have not decided on a mobo yet either so any suggestions would be great.

 

[nanaki333]

i wouldn't waste money with the WD raptor based drives anymore. a spinpoint f4 will give you almost the same performance now a days.

raid5 with 6 drives i would not do either. go with raid6 so you can lose up to 2 drives and still be OK.

WD RE3s have a pretty high failure rate. i suggest seagate constellation drives, or samsung spinpoints.

for the raid card, i highly recommend areca cards. they cost a pretty penny but worth every cent.

 

[nanaki333]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816151033

buy that. you won't be disappointed

 

[holty]

i wouldn't waste money with the WD raptor based drives anymore. a spinpoint f4 will give you almost the same performance now a days.

raid5 with 6 drives i would not do either. go with raid6 so you can lose up to 2 drives and still be OK.

WD RE3s have a pretty high failure rate. i suggest seagate constellation drives, or samsung spinpoints.

for the raid card, i highly recommend areca cards. they cost a pretty penny but worth every cent.

DUDE that is EXACTLY the type of input i need, thank you VERY much, I greatly appreciate you making the effort to help me here.

I will probably go with a RAID 6 as you mentioned I could lose up to two drives because redundancy is very important to me. This data on the RAID 6 WILL get backed up nightly, BUT i still don't want to deal with a lost drive and restoring if i don't have to.

Thanks for the info on the RE3 drives, i will look into those other makes/models you are referring me to.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816151033

buy that. you won't be disappointed

THAT is a BADASS card but i think it might be out of my budget. I was hoping to do this with a sub $300 card?

Also, this is my first time building a system with more than 1 array. Are there any cards in my budget that will do both the arrays that i need using SATA drives?

Is there a problem using enterprise grade SATA drives with a RAID card meant to be used with SAS drives? this is where my knowledge is very limited. I've never used a SAS drive and dont have much hardware RAID experience.

Lastly, my case.....it is hot swap with 8 bays(which i don't really need hot swap) but i picked it (just purchased it today) because i love the fact i can remove/install a HDD without opening the case. That is important to me.

Any problems that you are familiar with, in regards to this case?

 

[pjkenned]

BTW: Skip the Areca 12xx series at this point. SATA cards.

SAS 2 / SATA III cards which work at 6.0gbps are basically current-generation. If you ever want to get crazy with storage and turn something like a Norco RPC-4224 into an external expander chassis, 6.0gbps controller + drives = twice the JBOD chassis to host bandwidth.

Some things you may want to look at, especially since this thread does not have the words "battery" or "BBU" yet:
1. Anatomy of a Hardware RAID Controller
2. Differences between HBAs, Software RAID, FakeRAID, and Hardware RAID.

Case wise, you made an excellent choice. Hot swap with larger numbers of disks saves a ton of time. Also, I think that case has SGPIO headers so you will know which drive fails when one finally does using a little light. I could be wrong but I think that backplane/ mobile rack supports it.

Cheers,
Patrick

 

[holty]

BTW: Skip the Areca 12xx series at this point. SATA cards.

SAS 2 / SATA III cards which work at 6.0gbps are basically current-generation. If you ever want to get crazy with storage and turn something like a Norco RPC-4224 into an external expander chassis, 6.0gbps controller + drives = twice the JBOD chassis to host bandwidth.

Some things you may want to look at, especially since this thread does not have the words "battery" or "BBU" yet:
1. Anatomy of a Hardware RAID Controller
2. Differences between HBAs, Software RAID, FakeRAID, and Hardware RAID.

Case wise, you made an excellent choice. Hot swap with larger numbers of disks saves a ton of time. Also, I think that case has SGPIO headers so you will know which drive fails when one finally does using a little light. I could be wrong but I think that backplane/ mobile rack supports it.

Cheers,
Patrick

Patrick,

Thank you for replying and giving me options to think about. I was always told and from my own experience with servers, hardware RAID is always best. Can you suggest a card make/model, or even just a make/series of card to look at? If i have to spend more than $300 so be it. I don't prefer to use a software RAID or FakeRAID or anything of the sort.

I understand that the server and RAID card both need a battery backup to prevent RAID degradation. Is that what you were getting at in your post above or am I misreading your post?

I wanted to choose a RAID card and than decide on battery backup solutions as I was under the assumption that most all decent RAID controller cards had battery backup "add on" options?

i do plan to have the server on a dedicated UPS w/ battery backup and auto shutdown.

Re: my case choice.....i'm so glad to hear you are a fan of that case. I did a TON of research on it, but came up short on info on the forums and such with real world usages and finding people who actually own it. I liked it so much anyways i bought it. It does in fact have the SGPIO support. Only problem is it only comes with a cable that supports up to four drives. i will need to purchase an additional cable to support all 8 of my drives.

 

[pjkenned]

Current-generation cards would be the Areca 1880i would be a good, albeit expensive solution. One other option is the LSI 9260-8i. Realistically, these new cards are about the same price as the previous generation 3.0gbps cards so it is generally better to get the newer faster cards.

Remember, battery back-ups are controller/ manufacturer specific. So when pricing, add the $100+ to the cost of the controller.

The reason you want to use the BBU is for write-back cache. The simple answer here is that you need to write two parity blocks when writing data to the RAID 6 array, after parity has been calculated. Write-back cache allows the data to sit in the cache and then written in a more sequential fashion. If you look in SSD articles comparing hard drives to SSDs, you'll see hard drives actually have decent sequential I/O and very poor random I/O. In a simple world, this is how the cache optimizes performance.

Since the OS writes data to the cache, if there is a power interruption to the controller, you lose data written in the cache. UPS is good, UPS + BBU is much better (if the motherboard fails for example, UPS generally does you no good without a BBU.)

 

[Engineer]

I posted in another thread buy received no response (yet). Any comments on the following Intel Unit....supposed to be using a LSI controller from what I have read (don't know though)...


Update: More info on the card too.

Any thoughts on this for $200 shipped?

Looking around the net, seems like a steal of a price for this controller but really not enough information to make me jump (or justify) the purchase. Having never done a RAID but always tempted.......I'm getting the itch to play with something new and exciting, LOL!

Another vendor at $184.xx...

Read a few terrible reviews on the first link posted...not sure on the 2nd one.

 

[pjkenned]

LSI 1068 based, previous generation.

Not terrible, but I would generally advise going for the newer generation cards. That is not exactly a powerhouse RoC solution for RAID 6.

 

[nanaki333]

some good info going on in here! i had a look at the case you chose and noticed it's just that... a case. you can get a supermicro barebone for about the same price, unless of course, you got it for free.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816101236
pasted the wrong link the first time. just add at least 3x2GB ECC memory (really cheap), and a cheap low power dual core xeon

 

[Emulex]

the 3 series RE4 2TB are just out the door (part ending in 3) - use those. they will rock. i have them in a nas and punish them with 60machines backing up full bare metal every night and these are the real deal. no smart issues yet.

 

[holty]

some good info going on in here! i had a look at the case you chose and noticed it's just that... a case. you can get a supermicro barebone for about the same price, unless of course, you got it for free.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816101236
pasted the wrong link the first time. just add at least 3x2GB ECC memory (really cheap), and a cheap low power dual core xeon

Thank you for that link. I did look into going this route but I chose to buy the case alone for a couple of reasons. Please tell me if i am mistaken?

1. the case i bought was $399 and THAT particular mobo i can get from newegg for $200
2. the only other item that combo you linked comes with is a cpu cooler which is probably $30-$50?

looks to me like i'm still about $100 savings buying the case by itself and than purchasing the mobo separately.

3. i'm not sure i want that mobo, it does not have very good reviews on newegg
4. the case i purchased has 4 fans, the ones that comes in that superserver you linked to only has 3

I must admit, Supermicro's website is very difficult to be able to compare the different superservers if you don't know what cpu style you want.

 

[Rubycon]

There is no such thing as a SATA "enterprise drive". If you want/need enterprise stuff, you want SAS/FCAL, PERIOD.

Velociraptors are enthusiast product not a server grade product. If you have a need for a 2.5" disk you would be better served by a 15K SAS product. (or SSD)

Don't skimp on the RAID card! Consider RAID6 instead of RAID5 and NEVER use a RAID5 without a hotspare. Just remember the rebuild times with TB+ disks. SATA disks - even those touted as enterprise storage - will not have the reliability of a true enterprise disk. (Fujitsu MBA series, for example)

I've heard good things about Seagate Constellation 2TB SAS 7.2k disks for storage. I hope so because we just started a SAN rollout with pallets of them!

 

[nanaki333]

Thank you for that link. I did look into going this route but I chose to buy the case alone for a couple of reasons. Please tell me if i am mistaken?

1. the case i bought was $399 and THAT particular mobo i can get from newegg for $200
2. the only other item that combo you linked comes with is a cpu cooler which is probably $30-$50?

looks to me like i'm still about $100 savings buying the case by itself and than purchasing the mobo separately.

3. i'm not sure i want that mobo, it does not have very good reviews on newegg
4. the case i purchased has 4 fans, the ones that comes in that superserver you linked to only has 3

I must admit, Supermicro's website is very difficult to be able to compare the different superservers if you don't know what cpu style you want.

i prefer getting everything in one large bundle, mostly due to laziness. having everything already installed, with the cable management already taken care of is wonderful. i only buy their rackmount servers, but noticed you were specifically getting a tower. the rackmounts they have with hot swap bays and redundant PSUs are the absolute best value.

 

[holty]

i prefer getting everything in one large bundle, mostly due to laziness. having everything already installed, with the cable management already taken care of is wonderful. i only buy their rackmount servers, but noticed you were specifically getting a tower. the rackmounts they have with hot swap bays and redundant PSUs are the absolute best value.

Ah ok gotcha! I enjoy building my own boxes but i get your point for sure. i don't have any racks at home so this will be going next to a couple of my desktops sitting under a computer desk. I prefer this form factor for now.

I also looked into buying the redundant PSU version of this case but its much MUCH more expensive than this one.

any suggestions on a motherboard?

 

[pjkenned]

With the above application I would go with something like a Supermicro X8SIL-F or X8SIA-F.

It looks like the LGA 1156 platform will be fine for you. If you wanted to wait for C200 series motherboards and Sandy Bridge Xeons, you could do that but if you get IPMI 2.0/ KVM-over-IP, you won't use the onboard GPU anyway. LGA 1366, even UP is overkill here.

 

[holty]

With the above application I would go with something like a Supermicro X8SIL-F or X8SIA-F.

It looks like the LGA 1156 platform will be fine for you. If you wanted to wait for C200 series motherboards and Sandy Bridge Xeons, you could do that but if you get IPMI 2.0/ KVM-over-IP, you won't use the onboard GPU anyway. LGA 1366, even UP is overkill here.

I appreciate you taking the time to give me suggestions. I would like to stay with the LGA 1366 platform though for future expandability and upgradeability and lastly i will eventually put this machine to work with more and more tasks or VM's.

any suggestions for LGA 1366 boards?

 

[nanaki333]

what type of budget do you have left for your board? i'd like to give you a fair warning, that 1366 chipsets for servers are very picky on the ram. i learned the hard way and got spoiled by s775 where you can put any ECC or even desktop memory in those servers and it worked.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131378 this looks nice for an alternative to supermicro.

 

[holty]

what type of budget do you have left for your board? i'd like to give you a fair warning, that 1366 chipsets for servers are very picky on the ram. i learned the hard way and got spoiled by s775 where you can put any ECC or even desktop memory in those servers and it worked.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131378 this looks nice for an alternative to supermicro.

I'd like to keep it UNDER $300 for a board, closer to $200 if possible. You're suggestion looks interesting. I"ll do some reading....

 

[nanaki333]

that's what i wanted to hear! then here you go my man!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131378

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813151193

both got really good reviews. if you really plan to start using this server for actual VMs and heavy duty server..... stuff.... it gives you the option to add another CPU later if needed.

 

[Emulex]

all my velociraptors say enterprise on them. they are the best you can get for SATA. but honestly the best solution is HP branded (or ibm). they custom tweak the controller and firmware to perform better. this is not the same as say supermicro/generic WD RE/constellation.

you pay a price but i prefer uptime over any cost. i guess i've seen too many failed raids. talk about panic attack.

if you can find a p400/p410 that runs in your mobo with a fanout cable = good times

 

[pjkenned]

I'd like to keep it UNDER $300 for a board, closer to $200 if possible. You're suggestion looks interesting. I"ll do some reading....

Dual CPU or single CPU and if dual do you want dual tylersberg or not?

Just looking at what you posted Intel 3420 is plenty.

For a UP system, you could use a X58-like board with the W35xx or W36xx CPUs. For example I am using a W3550 with a Supermicro X8ST3-F with 24GB of RAM right now which is not overly expensive. That board has an onboard LSI 1068e so you would likely want a board without the onboard controller or possibly a dual socket board.

Then again, moving from LGA 1156 to 1366 or a DP platform is a fairly big step. Especially if you are not sure yet about Win 7 and 2008 R2.

 

[Rubycon]

all my velociraptors say enterprise on them.

How many of them do you see in servers though?

There's a lot of (home) audio gear that says professional on it too - but you'd never find it on a stage.

 

[Emulex]

dunno going to throw a pair of them in a UCS C series i'll let you know. probably throw a GTX card in as well. can't learn without trying

I wouldn't use it for VMFS but i might use it for a parking datastore to migrate unused vm's and for thick to thin (and back) playground. will let you know how it works. I got two RE4 2TB i'm going to throw in an old ml350 in raid-1 and i'll let you know how that works for vmfs datastore for old ide pc's P2V. nice thing if the drives fail i have a script to vmotion everything off the sinking ship right away lol.

 

[holty]

Would this controller be a good compromise for what i need?

http://www.amazon.com/Areca-ARC-1210...8636530&sr=1-1