Silent.Sin
Gawd
- Joined
- Jun 23, 2003
- Messages
- 969
I'm looking to put together a cheap whitebox NAS server for the office that needs to have 2TB+ capacity. I want to use some form of RAID that is both speedy and has redundancy so I'm thinking either RAID5 or RAID01. This box is also to be used as an NFS datastore for an ESXi server so the individual drive speed as well as having multiple spindles is going to be a major focus. There likely won't be more than 4 VMs running at a time, but some of those VMs will be hosting I/O intensive db type applications. I was thinking about using a cheapie CPU+mobo combo and use software RAID on whatever mobo chipset I decided to get, but when I started looking at the options and then user experiences my head started spinning. So here are some of my questions:
1. Should I even bother trying to do this with software RAID on the chipset?
2. If I can use the chipset instead of an add-on card, what platform generally performs better: Intel or AMD? What chipsets specifically? Recommendations on a <$150 mobo?
3. If I need to go add-on card, can I get away with using a cheaper solution that is <$100? (examples). This isn't meant to be enterprise class hardware with 512MB of onboard cache, I just need it to work reasonably well and with some decent reliability. This will all be backed up off-site so if the whole array crashes we won't be doomed.
4. Once I get the RAID support figgered out, what should my array consist of, ie- how many disks? If I go with RAID5 I've heard odd numbers of disks work best (3 or 5). Any truth to that?
If any of you guys have actually built something along these lines I'd love to hear what parts you used and how well it worked out. Thanks!
1. Should I even bother trying to do this with software RAID on the chipset?
2. If I can use the chipset instead of an add-on card, what platform generally performs better: Intel or AMD? What chipsets specifically? Recommendations on a <$150 mobo?
3. If I need to go add-on card, can I get away with using a cheaper solution that is <$100? (examples). This isn't meant to be enterprise class hardware with 512MB of onboard cache, I just need it to work reasonably well and with some decent reliability. This will all be backed up off-site so if the whole array crashes we won't be doomed.
4. Once I get the RAID support figgered out, what should my array consist of, ie- how many disks? If I go with RAID5 I've heard odd numbers of disks work best (3 or 5). Any truth to that?
If any of you guys have actually built something along these lines I'd love to hear what parts you used and how well it worked out. Thanks!