Afternoon all, The Raid Card As per the title - I believe I need a raid card. (Feel free to convince me otherwise) Having reviewed RAIDs again, I think RAID 5 without a hot spare is most suited to my needs? I think I need a card with Support for up-to 8 SATA3 drives On board parity processing? Dedicated memory? Battery backup? This needs to go in a PCI-E slot, and I have up to 16x available on a LGA1155 platform. The Raid We are looking at starting with 3 new 3TB disks to create a fresh array. I then have 2 full JBOD 3TB disks which I want to integrate (with data intact) to the array. This will surely expand over time and I hope it will be come the data backbone/core of my happy home. The Server It's for a media server, which I envisage will run WHS 2011 (again, feel free to tell me I'm doing it wrong) to provide varying content to 20+ internal network devices wired/fixed and wireless/mobile alike. While the usual TSB approach is 'money no object', as I'm more than aware that costs of these cards can extend well into the thousands (and thereby dwarfing the cost of everything attached to it) I therefore suspect I'll be looking at second-hand cards, or low end new ones. All information given, suggestions/recommendations gentlemen? (and lady) TSB
Is that 20 devices accessing at the same time? What sort of media will you be serving? For cheap you could mod a Dell Perc 6i (you need to put a bit of tape over one of the connectors on the pci-e slot on non Dell servers) and run it off that. A 2nd hand one with battery would be £150 or so
Lord no! Concurrent access will be limited to 3 separate instances at any one time, 4 maximum. I suspect the drives, which are WD Green drives, would be the limiting factor for anything more anyway. No relational databases here - pure home use. I just have a growing video and music collection which needs serving on demand, and a place to store temporary backups from the other networked computers. Looking at a fileserver over yet another NAS - as I would like to be able to remote into this using RDP from anywhere for unfiltered/unmonitored work browsing and easy management). PERC 6i seems like a fine suggestion, one I will probably take up on if I can find a 'bay listing that specifies what cables I'll need too. Is it worth picking up the max supported ECC memory for it, and will this have any benefit at all? Thanks for your help thus far, TSB EDIT: Just noted the 256Mb included is integrated...
Perc 6i is a well proven card and something I work with in the industry a lot. Thumbs up from me. There are usually loads on fleabay, just make sure you buy from a decent seller. Batteries are only about £13 so even if you see one with a duff battery it's not the end of the world. It'll run with a dead battery but the onboard caching will be disabled. To be honest on a home network with just media use you probably wouldn't even notice
If money is no object, buy an extra 3TB drive and add it to the array now. I sweat bullets every time I have to do OCE (not to mention it takes an eternity).
Yeah, I'll throw in another vote for a PERC 6i. Wanted one, but at the time the SRCSAS18E was cheaper and more available. Still a good card, but wondering if I should just dump it for a PERC.
Cheers, will definitely pick one up over the weekend after I sort out the below. Currently there is no RAID to speak of - the purchase of the raid card would be the first step! - I've just got JBOD at the mo. I googled OCE though, not knowing what it meant, and it seems like a big deal... and that it often doesn't even work! This could be a major problem for me, as I had planned to add disks incrementally... Searching for an "offline" equivalent yielded no results? What do you suggest? Buy all 8 disks at once now, and start from there? I really don't fancy spending £1500 on disks alone, but will if I have to... or can RAIDs be reliably expanded? Cheers, will be reading more into OCE before committing!
