In need of a raid controller and some Hard disk

[GJUK]

I am building a server for home, In need of a raid controller with a bit of poke, wanting an 8 port with about 3/4 disk to begin with (probably 1TB Drives) PCI-e will be needed

SO what option are there, budget...thinking about £250 for the card


What raid level best to use for performance, but with some protection against a drive failure? I Used Raid 5 and 1+0 before

The server will be more than likely running 2008 R2 or maybe ESXi with a few VM on there It be holding HD movies, remote access for files and I want to stream HD contect to my PS3 (if possible)

So point me in the right direction please

GJUK

[arthurleung]

For basic streaming, a 4-Bay NAS should be enough for your need. Or if you insist on whole PC, streaming content to PS3 you could just do with onboard RAID5. Not as expandable as using dedicated adapter though. I don't know how picky is ESXi but you'll probably want something solid state (Thumb drive or SSD) for the ESXi system disk.

I would say don't bother with 1TB drives and go straight for 2TB when they cost the same (may be less) per GB.

If you're planning on expanding, use RAID5 on 4 drives, then create another RAID5 when you need more space. I am not a fan of Online Capacity Expansion (OCE) on RAID, and using RAID5 on 8 Disks is too much of a risk for me.

If you're lucky to find a compatible motherboard, DELL PERC (5/i or 6/i) are very good card for the price (on Ebay). I find my GbE performance is terrible due to the crap Realtek lan chipset but local disk access is crazy fast.

[dirky]

Seems like a real mix of requirements, ESXi, NAS. Best idea is figure out what you want to do. Running ESXi is fine if you want to virtualise (provided the rest of your hardware is in the HCL) but it will restrict any other uses. For performance raid 0, obviously you have no redundancy so performance + redundancy is raid10. However, a decent 8 port card you are looking at 300 second hand, or considerably more if you want something like an areca card..
You should also consider rebuild time on the disks, larger drives is a longer rebuild time giving you greater exposure to a second drive failure (and possibly total dataloss). This is where raid6 would be considered giving you two parity drives..

[shaithis]

I know the Areca controllers are supported in ESX and ESXi (I have run both with ARC-1210 and ARC-1680 controllers) although they are outside of your budget.....but they are fast

You might want to investigate the LSIs that Scan list, basically they make the chips that Areca use so they may also be ESX compatible...and they are within your budget......in fact I just checked and this is in the HCL.

[arthurleung]

Seems like a real mix of requirements, ESXi, NAS. Best idea is figure out what you want to do. Running ESXi is fine if you want to virtualise (provided the rest of your hardware is in the HCL) but it will restrict any other uses. For performance raid 0, obviously you have no redundancy so performance + redundancy is raid10. However, a decent 8 port card you are looking at 300 second hand, or considerably more if you want something like an areca card..
You should also consider rebuild time on the disks, larger drives is a longer rebuild time giving you greater exposure to a second drive failure (and possibly total dataloss). This is where raid6 would be considered giving you two parity drives..

For Reference:

I just have my 3rd double disk failure of my own fault in the week, which a Y branch power cable came off. 8x2TB takes 11 hours to rebuild (5.5 hours per disk). Ended up just cellotaping all the molex connectors just now...

If you're serious enough definitely use a hotswap cage and high quality cabling.

[dirky]

Yup, all depends on how many drives are going to be in the raid. But 11 hours without any parity is scary

[GJUK]

Wow thanks Guys....

Been thinking about this over the weekend and as far as ESX goes, that will have to wait for now ( I have VM Workstation to muck around with VM and I may add a ESX server to my home network at another time (mainly for playing around with as I used it at work and always good to improve my knowlege for the old CV ;-))..

This means that I need a server to do....

RDP for remote access and use for basic apps at home like MS office etc
File storage (Music, Docs, Movies and picures)
Movie streaming for PS3 (PC in yhr house can access shares and users Media Browser plug-in for media center


As for RAID level

Think I need a controller to support RAID 5 and 6(most likely) RAID 10 would be nice (my HOme PC runs RAID 10) but that a lot of disk I need to get...SO I look for controller that supports those Raid levels then see how many disks I can afford to get.

I keep and eye out for the Perc 6i and the LSI one on scan...see if i can find some benchmarks etc

thanks for the Help

GJUK

[GJUK]

It taken a while but I now got a Raid Controller (Dell Perc 6) not to badly priced, probably helped that my company has a account with Dell

Right so on with the build (going to take a long long time)

I Have a case (Cheiftec Dragon well I have 2 a purple one and a gray one - yes I know there old, but will do the job for now)

I post the rest of the spec when I can

for temp I will be using 4 80GB SATA disk just to plan and test out the software and see if it works with the motherboard/cpu I have and to get an idea on performance

I think my first problem will be power supply, I don't think I got one suitable, but will have to see..lol

so shopping list looks like this....

New PSU (if I can't find one)
Large HDD I have 2 F3 Samsung 1TB so far so need a few more, and some temp storage as the 2 I have are full...lol
depending on test, may need better cpu/mobo....I have some old Dual CPU motherboard/chips that I be selling to fun this...

As for software

I going windows server 2008
Want to get this server running as a media server for my PS3 and PC round the house, the PS3 side will be the fun one to get running.


Watch this space....


GJUK