Hardware RAID5 on a microserver

[tfboy]

Ahh Hexus is fantastic, I was just about to post this thread when I noticed Jack's thread on a very similar topic

But for me, I do need performance out of my miniserver (doing lots of Cinema DCP work and all those j2k files and tiffs eat up space and performance can be dire).

So looking at using the PCIe slot by means of a hardware-based RAID card going to either the internal drive cage (if it has a connector supporting the 4x SATA connector thingy) and external connections to add external drive enclosures.

Obviously you can spend a lot of money on a decent RAID setup and if only I could borrow our SFA10k from work... so sticking to a reasonable budget of a couple of hundred quid or so, what would you recommend?

[spoon_]

LSI 9260-4i/8i and the rebrands by IBM [8i - M5015], Intel [8i - RS2BL080] and Dell [long shot rebrand [LSI 2108] but still, H700] but they won't have miniSAS connectors for SAS expanders [SFF-8087], only SFF-8087s which you can spilt into 4 internal SAS/SATA.

ARC-1880 series can offer mixture of both types, LP flavour can give you 1x8087 and 1x8088.

Original cards mentioned above will set you back £400-£500 notes at the very best, Areca probably a bit more.

Rebrands tend to be cheaper, IBM mentioned above is around £300-£350 [got one to flog for £270 if interested], Intel pretty much the same.

How many disks do you want to have in your array? Also what kind of enclosures do you have in mind?

When it comes to SAS expander cards there are only two flavours worth considering:

Intel RES2SV240,
HP 468406-B21.

I have both and cannot say which one I prefer - they are excellent! Intel one doesn't have to sit in PCI-E slot - power coming from molex connector is enough. HP one will do full 24 drives on 6 x 8087s, two are reserved for expander to host communication giving you two 6Gbps "uplinks". Intel can do 5 x 8087 with single 6Gbps link or 4 x 8087 with two 6Gbps links back to host. Again, each 8087 will spilt into 4. Expander to host will use 8070 <--> 8087 for single link and double that for dual link.

Chassis wise you can probably get 24 bay ish server one from eBay and rip the insides out leaving you with backplanes and hot swap bays up front.

Most of dedicated enclosures will do pass-through so you can daisy chain the enclosures together i.e. one 8080 'in' and two 8080 out to next enclosures.

Is this a bit OTT though? If not we can carry this into more detail. If yes then my bad ;S

[jim]

Seems a bit crazy to spend more on a RAID card than the server it's used in, but it's not the easiest thing to do I guess.

Even the bigger HP servers don't come with RAID5 on them, you have to get a higher spec model to include a RAID card as standard. Having said that, I presume you have looked into it? It might end up being a much easier solution.

[tfboy]

Thanks guys.
I'm fairly up to speed on all the HP ProLiant server stuff - just spent around £200k on a load for work. Unfortunately, none of them were for my personal use, and what I love about the HP microserver is the really efficient use of power. If I could get a P410i controller with some BBWC giving me the RAID, that would do, but I suspect they're only compatible with the DL and BL servers and not true standalone dedicated RAID controllers.

I would be looking at probably 5-8 drives in total using 2 or 3TB SATAs.

I already have four 2TB drives I could reuse, although they are eco grean 5400rpm drives so it's a bit unfair to expect blazing speeds from them.

edited to add I'm not after GB/s performance. A sustaines 100-200MB would be great, but it's simultaneous read and write that kill my speeds at the moment. Hardware RAID with some dedicated cache should be more than enough. Those above cards are probably the range above what I really need and are on the expensive side.

Do you know if those controllers allow to add a drive to the array and restripe non-destructively? If so, I'd adopt WHS 2008 and ditch the v1 I'm using at the moment with drive expander.

[tfboy]

Looks like the HP P410 is the best bet. It uses the SFF-8087 4x mini-SAS connector which is the same as that of the original drive cage so no adaptors necessary. Then I can also add a second identical connector and up to another four hard drives.

Card is around £120-130 for the model with the 256MB RAM and that (or maybe the 512MB version) gives you live RAID migration

edit: bummer, need the BBWC version to get the live migration features. Bumps up the price a bit